I’m back on my blog (yeah, right)!
My last post was on September 2014. For someone who claims to love blogging, a year’s gap between blog posts sure doesn’t look like I walk the talk.
The usual excuses apply.
I don’t regret not updating my blog one bit. However, all these microblogging platforms (we call them social media sites now) are really spoiling me.
Remember those problogger advice about how important it is that our blog posts be meaty and long and meaningful? Yeah, well, not many of us, including yours truly, have the patience to do that anymore.
It’s easier to just click on that Retweet or Share button, splotch a paragraph or two of your own thoughts, and make other people’s posts your own. And your status feeds starts to pile up and gives you this fake satisfaction and psych yourself into thinking, “Hey, job well done! You’ve posted XXX amount of posts, you’re so productive! What a writer!”
And, instead of filtering your thoughts, you filter your Friends, Circles, and Followers so that you won’t feel too bad about spamming them with your whining and ramblings, and your readers be, like, “Oh yeah. Liked! Shared! RT! Next.” And that makes your content – and you – feel like such a big deal.
Ah… yes. Instant gratification. Who doesn’t like that?
This, my blog readers, is why I still keep my blog. I see it clearly, the effect social media has on us. I’m not saying it’s wrong or it’s bad. I’m merely pointing out that if we truly have something meaningful to say, we write about it. Or, my case, blog about it.
I run several other blogs (that, unfortunately, suffers the same lack of update as this one) to help me compartmentalize my elaborated thoughts. In WebGrrrl.net’s case, I don’t see myself changing this blog to anything other that about WordPress, web dev, programming, and the Internet.
And that’s the great thing about focused blogging on the things we love to do. We blog because we want to blog. If we, for some reason, stop blogging for a period of time, going back to it isn’t so hard and you don’t feel as guilty because in real life you’re still doing it. You’re just not blogging about it. And that is okay.
Yes, it is.
Ass-kicking web development
… still kicks ass. Yes, this is the age of mobile, where all apps and online services are pushing towards a Mobile First strategy. Almost all the attention, all online user experiences, and subsequently all money are to be made in mobile apps.
Sure, you’ve heard of the web developer’s dilemma of making a web site compatible on different device viewports and stuff. Heck, viewports have been a developer’s nightmare since even before mobile devices became the norm. So that’s no big deal, really. Now with Bootstrap and its counterparts, viewports are the least of our worries.
Nope.
The biggest worry for a web developer is making a web site work offline. This issue was only resolved by native mobile apps, and this was the biggest issue I have faced for the past two years. It’s so serious, that web developers everywhere are quietly and rushing to catch up and move on to mobile development. Web developers like me are losing ground, and our marketability are at stake.
And I need to learn Java?!
Google Chrome team and open source to the rescue
Thankfully, all these have been addressed with the introduction of Service Worker, aggressively worked on by the Chrome team, as well as Apache Cordova and web componentization like Polymer, which takes web development to a whole new level, allowing us web developers to continue using our existing skillsets onto newer territories.
It’s an exciting time to be a web developer. These new frameworks and development methods are both familiar and refreshing, and takes out the dullness out of my years of web dev experience and especially after my WordPress learning high some eight years ago.
It’s a story for another blog post.
I still call myself a web developer. Sometimes I tell people I’m a web app developer, since I do hybrid mobile apps. But it has always been about the Web.
I’m staying true to my web heritage, and very proudly so.
Check out my other posts: « Importing raw SHP files into MySQL / What an awesome year »