Not only that, but developing websites 10 years ago kinda sucked. Browsers were wildly inconsistent, it was common to have another CSS stylesheet for IE only, JS was so fragmented that jQuery was an instant hit.
On the other hand pages were much smaller, you'd rely on HTML much more than on JS which meant you'd rarely be working with bundlers and such.
But still, if you take the state of the web for what it is, the sheer productivity with today's tools is unparalleled. I think the best time to start coding is tomorrow.
GoDaddy have been caught doing some dodgy things in the past. Like taking your money for brokerage and not doing any work afterwards.
Or registering domains and parking them if lot of people search for them e.g. via who is or the registration form.
Hopefully they've turned it around and actually working on useful services nowadays...
It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento.
Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too.
Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs, help desk software.
Figure out your pitch too - your job may save server costs (and increase development costs but maybe don't mention that), optimize response time of employees, increase productivity, or retain shoppers.
Unfortunately my experience is as an outsourced employee so not too relevant for pitching as a contractor.
But product managers are usually pretty happy to hear you out and usually benefit from referring people they've talked to. And they respond on LinkedIn.
It shouldn't be too hard, contractors were common, employee turnover was significant too. Platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud usually have an API that supports an older version of JavaScript so employees are a bit harder to retain and a lot depends on contractors. That's why I suggested that particular platform, plus it's easy to find their customers if you browse the SFCC customer stories.
I realize it sounds like a terrible job after the above but I truly enjoyed my years there even though the quality of the websites varies a lot.
It's really quality vs quantity. Some really utilize whatever analytics tool they use, others just throw in more tools. It's a bit of a hit-and-miss industry in terms of code quality. Even the big ones.
Anecdotal reports basically, obviously 10x is just a round number I picked. I've seen a company that switched citing up to 40x hardware reduction going from Ruby on rails to Go.
I think you're significantly underestimating how well-performing PHP is, in the narrow but important field of serving dynamic web pages. Go (or Java, or C#) can be faster but you might be surprised that it's less of a slam-dunk win than one might expect. Python and Ruby basically aren't in the same league. Nodejs can be said to be licking at its heels, at best. Yes, seriously.
I'd put PHP somewhere under the middle of the list of languages/ecosystems I'd like to work in again (RoR, specifically, though not Ruby generally; non-TypeScript JavaScript; and gnarly AbstractFactoryImpl-style Java are all probably worse than it, IMO, and of course PHP deep in anything like Wordpress is pretty miserable) and I like Go quite a bit, but there's no denying that if performance is a top criterion PHP should probably be on your short list when choosing a language/ecosystem, and if PHP's not going to cut it then probably no scripting languages are on your list, and you're very likely looking real hard at C++.
Genuinely curious, not judgemental here. How did the usually-much-better-paid people feel about this? Did they complain that their salaries were now closer to the lesser paid people?
Like, I could see somebody not feeling like that's fair so I'm wondering how the morale was impacted by that.
That assumes you have the means, the knowledge, and the time, to go through a build step.
What you find to be clean code might go the opposite way for someone (i.e. why would I use scss if utils are all I need?).
You might work with large scale apps where BEM may make more sense. You might work on a site builder where utils might be better. You might be creating splash pages for marketing purposes where going for element selectors may be enough.
The english "out" is pronounced like the dutch "oud". Would you say "oud" and "uit" are the same? An afslouddijk sounds different from an afsluitdijk. The english "oid" (as in humanoid) I think is closer to our "uit" sound than "out" would be.
Disclaimer: don't speak Dutch; no training in Dutch; going solely off of wikipedia.
Wikipedia tells us that Dutch "ui" is the diphthong /œy/ and "ou" is the diphthong /ɑu/. The English MOUTH vowel is conventionally /aʊ/ in American pronunciation, and the CHOICE vowel is conventionally /ɔɪ/. I will analyze them as if they were /au/ and /ɔi/.
It's clear that the MOUTH vowel is the best available English match for Dutch "ou". The difference between [a] and [ɑ] is minimal.
Dutch "ui" is trickier. /œy/ starts with a front vowel, which isn't true of /au/ or /ɔi/. /ɔ/ is a better match in terms of vowel height. (According to the notation. This is a case where you're probably better off just listening to samples; vowel notation is quite sloppy.)
/y/ is the high front rounded vowel, a sound which, like /œ/ (mid-low front rounded), does not exist in English. It has two obvious approximants: FLEECE (/i/), the high front unrounded vowel, and GOOSE (/u/), the high back rounded vowel. If you choose FLEECE, prioritizing the vowel's frontness, you'll end up thinking that "ui" should correspond to the English CHOICE vowel -- the first part of the diphthong has been moved back, and the second part has been unrounded, but compromises have to be made. If you pick GOOSE, then you'll end up on the MOUTH vowel -- in this case, the first part gets moved back and lowered somewhat, and the second part also gets moved back but preserves its lip rounding.
Is either of those choices objectively right? No. You might prefer thinking of "ui" as CHOICE on the grounds that that makes it different from "ou", but that runs into the problem that (according to wikipedia again) Dutch also includes an "oi" diphthong which is a close match to English CHOICE.
You could think of the root of the problem as being that Dutch has three high vowels /i/, /y/, /u/ (spelled "ie", "uu", "oe" among other ways, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography ), where English has only /i/ and /u/. You're going to end up with collisions somewhere.
I guess the 'ui' and the 'g' are hardest to pronounce correctly for non-native Dutch speakers.
We have a tongue-twister for German and English people that goes like this "Ik eet uitsluitend gefruite uien in mijn geruite keuken" (you can have Google Translate read it out loud). Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".
> Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".
That sentence is more ambiguous in English than you might think! I'm curious which of these meanings are compatible with the Dutch:
1. The only thing I do in my checkered kitchen is eat fried onions. (Other activities don't take place in the checkered kitchen.)
2. Fried onions are the only thing I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Other foods must be eaten elsewhere.)
3. Fried onions are the only type of onion I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Raw onions must be eaten elsewhere, but eating steak in the kitchen is OK.)
4. My checkered kitchen is the only place in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak anywhere, but I won't eat fried onions outside the kitchen.)
5. My checkered kitchen is the only one of my kitchens in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak in any kitchen, but I won't eat fried onions in my plain white kitchen.)
6. My checkered kitchen is the only checkered kitchen in which I will eat fried onions. (I won't eat fried onions in your checkered kitchen, but I will eat them in the bedroom.)
Ha, that's cool. You found a lot of different interpretations. These also exist in Dutch. No. 3 comes closest to how most people would understand the meaning in Dutch, but some others like no. 4 would fit too.
I read it as having meaning #2 but it depends on the intonation and context. If you emphasize fried then it's #3. If we're talking about having fried onions and not in your kitchen I'd probably assume #4.
Number 4 would be "Ik eet gefruite uien uitsluitend in mijn geruite keuken", though.
It mostly gets confusing for me because of moving back and forth between English and Dutch grammar, but any bit of context would make it a lot less ambiguous :)
Most things germans try to pronounce are just way off in general (living in germany, the topic comes up regularly), but by far the worst seems to be the sch as in Scheveningen or schatje. It usually turns into skatje and since that isn't a soft sound they morph it into an angry word to make fun of how our word for sweetie sounds after morphing.
I must admit that this is a little beyond me and I don't really understand what you're trying to say. Do I understand correctly that you're saying the vowel in choice is the best match for the Dutch "ui" when going off of the IPA notation, but that there exists no good match in English like there is for "ou"?
I'm saying that (1) there is no perfect or near-perfect match; (2) it isn't clear which available option is the "best" match, because the three obvious options each sacrifice something different.
If you're interested in the theory:
Vowels are generally thought of as being points in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are:
1. Whether the vowel is high or low -- if your mouth opens wide (chin closer to feet), it's a lower vowel; if your mouth doesn't open far (chin closer to eyes), it's a higher vowel.
2. Whether the vowel is front or back. The traditional way to explain this to linguistics students is to give them all lollipops. You put the lollipop on the middle of your tongue with the stick jutting out of your mouth. You can observe that the stick juts farther forward when you're pronouncing the FLEECE vowel than it does when you're pronouncing the GOOSE vowel.
3. Whether, as you pronounce the vowel, your lips are rounded or not.
Dutch "ui" is a diphthong, a transition from one vowel to another vowel. It appears to be a transition from (lowish, front, rounded) to (high, front, rounded). This is difficult for English because, in English, all front vowels are unrounded.
If you'd like to preserve the lip-rounding aspect of "ui", you need to use back vowels, at which point the MOUTH vowel is a near-perfect (low, back, xx[1]) -> (high, back, rounded) match.
If you'd like to preserve the frontness of "ui", the English FACE vowel is available, which is a transition from (lowish, front, unrounded) to (high, front, unrounded). CHOICE is a different option; it's (lowish, back, rounded) -> (high, front, unrounded). With CHOICE, you're choosing to match the rounding (and not the frontness) of the beginning of "ui", but transition into an end that matches frontness instead of rounding.
Which part of a sound is more important for purposes of matching a foreign sound to a native sound is a very interesting question, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea why different languages make the choices they do. My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui", even though it's an even better match for Dutch "ou". But someone else might disagree.
For an example of "differential splitting", consider that in modern English, W, V, and F are three separate sounds. In Old English, W and F were "real" sounds ("phonemes"), and V was a variety ("allophone") of F. In modern Mandarin Chinese, W and F are also phonemes, and V is an allophone of... W. Clearly, if you speak modern Mandarin, what's important about the V sound is not the same thing that would be important if you spoke Old English.
[1] Rounding is less obvious for low vowels -- a certain amount of lip rounding is induced by opening your mouth so far.
That was actually very interesting! I understand what you are saying now (admittedly I first thought "more theory? Not sure", probably because I had a very hard time following your last comment). I actually get it now and feel like I learned something new. Thanks for that write-up!
As for
> My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui",
I personally stand by my choice of the CHOICE vowel also after reading your comparison of the different options, but it's definitely a close contest.
W, V and F are also separate sounds in Dutch, but much closer to each other than in English. Wat, vat and fat are different words. The Dutch W is not bilabial like the English W, but just a "softer" version of the V. (In practice, V is often pronounced almost the same as F).
Thinking about it some more, you can get more easily away with the "eh" in MEH (not the /ə/ but the /ɛ/). That way you'll sound like someone speaking with a The Hague accent, and if you're otherwise speaking English, this will most probably slip by completely unnoticed to most Dutch listeners (unlike OU or OI would).
That's my point ;) I think ui sounds more like the English oi than like the English/Dutch ou. I'm not sure there exists a word in English that contains the ui sound as we know it.
A while ago I was thinking the same about compensation but then someone pointed out that if you were eligible for one, they would have incentive to not let you go.
It would be cheaper for everyone to just keep you unfairly.
This is why Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. At least in theory, they'll carry out their job impartially because they don't have to run for re-election. They'll hold their position long past when the current administration so any conflict of interest should be mitigated over time. Directly electing judges has its own set of problems. I'm not trying to argue for one way over the other, just pointing out that the executive branch appointing judges is not inherently wrong.
first off, given the context of having kept someone 22 years this sounds ridiculous.
If they kept someone 2.2 years and then didn't compensate you could argue incentives to keep but after a certain amount of years it seems like there isn't any difference between what they actually are doing and how they would behave with incentive not to let you go.
Aside from that there could be ways to structure compensations, for example a scheme where you get less compensation per year for short time, more compensation per year for longer time might make them want to let you go and cut their losses once they determine you were innocent.
I'm sure it's a few levels more complex than that though; the ongoing cost of incarceration might for example include paying for jobs and services and often is a big part of the county or town economy.
They might not pay it out of the pocket, but they may pay with their jobs one way or another:
Elected judges and prosecutors may lose elections when the electorate hears they shell out huge compensations, especially to people the electorate is not really convinced are innocent (because unlike the judges, who were at the trial obviously, the electorate learned only a tiny fraction of information about a case from more or less reliable media sources at best, and outright rumors and gossip at worst).
Appointed judges are still appointed by somebody, and that somebody is a (group of) politician(s). These politicians have the same issues as the elected judges and prosecutors, and may avoid this (or even retaliate) by not appointing judges (to higher circuits) that are perceived to be risky in this regard, effectively killing the careers of these judges. So if you want to become an appointed judge, you still better pay close attention to the political scene and play ball.
