bkgunby

This is a question that kept creeping up when I was researching which static website provider to choose from.

Most of these offer free plans that can be used for general purposes, but how can they afford it if most of the customers aren't paying?

To name a few: surge.sh, netlify and github pages.

I'm graduating in a couple of years, and I would like to find some project ideas.

I've done some web programming in the past, but gradually I became more interested in the operations side of things.

But unlike apps, I'm not sure how to showcase a particular "devops project" to future employers. I've used docker/vagrant for local development, ansible for configuration management, jenkins, etc. But these aren't necessarily something I can talk about hours on end.

I'm planning to find a devops internship position, but until then, is there something I could work on?

Apple introduced the touchbar. MS is supposedly seeing a lot more people buying their surface lineup. I'm trying to purchase a laptop but, stepping back for a moment, a thought came across my mind: Just how useful is the touch screen really? What's so good about them that a lot of companies are willing to do it?

In places where I need portability, such as in bed or during commute, I can simply pull out my laptop and get stuff done much quicker. If that's not possible, I almost always reach for my phone. A tablet feels awkward to use in settings like this.

For touch-based shortcuts, it will be extremely challenging to be proficient at it. I'm talking second nature of pro gamers or digital artists. Imagine replacing your keyboard with a touch-only keyboard. The lack of reference forces you to look down, especially when the keys are far away from each other. Another example: Emoji touchbar. What's the point when you can simply "ctrl+cmd+space"? It requires less movement and provides a quicker way to browse them.

One advantage would be for doing creative work. However, I feel like there still needs improvements to complete with something like a cintiq. The pressure sensitivity is worse, and doing detailed work requires me to zoom in farther than usual. I'm optimistic that it will be much better in a few years, but for now, I'm hesitant to purchase something that will become outdated soon. It's not like I can just replace the touch screen portion of the laptop.

New technologies fascinate me. Whenever something different comes out, instead of lashing out because it's outside of my comfort zone, I always try to adapt. But this is one of the few things that I can't seem to understand. At first I thought the benefit of a touch-screen was accessibility over speed and proficiency. However, I'm beginning to think that it's more redundant than accessible.

Whether in lectures or learning things on the job, how do you retain what you learned? How do you write them down?

With the popularity of SPA's, I was curious whether or not it would be viable to approach the web frontend like a mobile app: Deploy it separately, and use the server as a dedicated API endpoint.

Aside from SEO and faster perceived load time, what are some drawbacks to this approach? What are the benefits?