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I had really good luck with combining B.E.M[^], a css preprocessor, and something like patternlab[^] to develop the front end independently of the back end. That lets you develop the front end without the nasty css cascades, and by using components with mock data and multiple states.
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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God bless JSON and JSONP these days I don't have a problem separating front and backend.
Through talking about it on this thread I've come to realize it's mostly CSS I hate.
And it's because its layout engine is just awful.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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yeah CSS is horrid and overly powerful. I was so happy to work on a project that implemented BEM. After that I saw that it could at least be reigned in. I do mostly server side and backend type work now, not a front end dev anymore.
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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i usually do backend stuff as well, but sometimes front end is unavoidable.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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1. Don't support Internet Explorer. The only reason it exists anymore is for legacy business web apps and Microsoft has told web devs to stop supporting it in new sites and applications.
2. Invest in a browser screenshot tool like LambdaTest to cut down on your browser testing time. You can run a test and only do detailed testing on the screenshots that don't look right.
3. Use source control like git. This is a general development tip, but many in Web Dev seem to skip stuff like this to save time. It is worth it to be able to have a history of your changes. There are plenty of IDEs like Visual Code Code that integrate with git directly to make this really easy.
4. Use a smart deployment tool like git-ftp. Free for all FTP'ing everything to server will just lead to issues in the long run, especially if you need multiple people pushing changes out to your server.
5. Setup a local web server for development. This cuts all of the time involved pushing your changes out to test them. Their are plenty of AMP packages to pick from (XAMP or MAMP comes to mind) also if you have Windows Pro you can install IIS and install MySQL and PHP natively. You can also use a host file tool to redirect your domain name to your local machine while testing. I prefer HostProfiles for this on Windows (open to other suggestions if anyone knows of a better Windows tool in active development) and Gasmask for this on macOS.
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i already do all of that except the php bit. ick. i'm not worried about xamp. And I integrate VS with github.
None of that is the issue. Really, CSS is what makes web dev crappy.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Google "object oriented CSS". Its a practice of creating reusable css classes and styles that helps eliminate the tediousness of working with CSS.
I would also recommend separating your text css and site layout css into separate files that are loaded before your general css file. Having all of the general elements already styled out before doing specific element overrides will help eliminate the amount of CSS you have to write. You could even do this with form element CSS as well.
You should also look at using a css reset vs using a css normalize and decide which approach fits your css approach best. I prefer using a reset because of the consistency it provides to the design in the end, but I know a lot of folks prefer using a normalize because there is less general element styling you end up needing in the end.
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I usually use bootstrap to get to a baseline, but I've used resetters before too.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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HTML/CSS/JavaScript has long been a black hole for programming and debugging time. Those technologies were never intended to do what is asked of them today.
My advice is to focus on WebAssembly (in the Microsoft world, that is Blazor). HTML and C# is all that is needed. The temptation for web developers is to fall back on JavaScript (via JS Interop in Blazor) instead of learning how things are done in Blazor (HTML and C#).
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webassembly is great but i imagine it's hell on page load times.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Nope. A page may load a little slower the first time, but not really that noticeable. Since webassembly is stateful, not stateless, page operation is actually faster. And loads are minimized to just what is needed.
You should try it for yourself. I think you will find that server-side Blazor is quite fast, especially for intranet applications. The improvement in stability and decreased development time more than makes up for a few microseconds of latency or initial page load delay.
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That's interesting. It must support partial assembly loading to keep page load times down i guess. That's cool, if true. Even loading the entire System.dll into a page is reams of "asm.js"
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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One of the solutions is by using RAD controls. There are some controls out there like D*vExpress, T*lerik, etc.
They do have some tools to help you with this problem.
If you are working with a company that has an R&D team then you can build your own framework to tackle this issue.
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the tools are never good enough, IME.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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The zenith of web development ease was reached with ASP.NET's WebForms. Though the internals were constantly being refined, in 2010 ao decision was made somewhere to promote the MVC paradigm of development. Everyone got on the band wagon and the rest is history.
The result is the mess of tools, tool kits, JavaScript frameworks, JavaScript, and a lots of other technologies people now have to contend with simply to develop web applications.
People should learn to leave well enough alone and stop complaining about every technical idiosyncrasy they come across.
WebForms was surely not a perfect environment but to date there has been nothing better to compete with it in terms of ease of use and just getting the job done....
WebForms is still available so maybe it would be a good idea to return to them and drop the rest of the crap that has been promoted in the past 9 years...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@ix.outlook.com
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I tend to agree, but then I've never liked MVC and I find it heavy handed.
Usually I just develop UI apps as kind of last mile glue, and all the important stuff is wrapped up in nice class based apis the the UI calls.
I don't care about separating content and layout and control in such an environment, although I'll concede that the web with its myriad of devices make it somewhat useful, but it's still a lot of churn to build and maintain.
MVC is useful if you're building something like Visual Studio or MS Word.
With UIs being glue I just tie whatever i need to work together, factor only as much as I have to, or as much comes naturally, and make my class libraries do all the heavy lifting.
No need for MVC. No need for huge UI frameworks. Just give me what i need.
WebForms was good at that. Its abstractions were clunky in the beginning sometimes (postback initially not working on all browsers in ASP.NET 1, etc) but they're generally just enough to be useful without being impositional.
I really liked it. HTML layout was still a pain. But then CSS is CSS and it's cranky about layouts, especially doing single screen layouts that don't scroll and require fixed heights.
I just get frustrated with it.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I always found WebForms to be far superior to all of the MVC nonsense. True, they had their own complexities but they were all manageable within its development environment.
When the migration to MVC began I started considering retiring and 4 years later I did so. The entire case for MVC and Agile and everything else that surrounded MVC just made no sense to me.
Who really cares about the edges in performance, which over the larger scheme of things really wasn't all that impressive, when compared to the ease of development that webForms provided?
The entire profession took a very bad turn in 2010 and it has been paying the price since...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I agree. MVC is too much baggage for most apps, in terms of development lifecycle and maintenance and it doesn't have a compelling advantage to WebForms unless you're writing something like Office or Visual Studio, or maybe Outlook web or something seriously complex in terms of the UI.
The only thing about it that makes sense for the web is separation of presentation, data, and control
that's kind of nice, but again, it's not necessary for so many apps.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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What is very interesting was that up until some point last year, one of Microsoft's web pages devoted to MVC on their web site actually discouraged its use for database intensive applications as its primary advantage was in basic, content web sites.
When I went back to find the statement as a result of an online discussion I was having with someone at the time, it had mysteriously disappeared...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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That seems odd to me but then I come at MVC from a desktop UI background and most of what I know about MVC comes from that perspective. I can't imagine it's much different for web dev though. MVC complicates things
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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You are one of the very few professionals, I have discussed this topic with that agrees with my perspectives. Leave it to a young lady to have a superior intelligence to most of our male colleagues... 
In any event, I came out of the DBASE world of the 1980s and early 1990s. I worked with just about every single DBASE variant available with the exception of one. Developing database applications with these environments was quite easy and enjoyable.
The Emerald Bay version of this environment was the best of them all. It was fast, had a very unique database system that was relatively close to the standard DBF file system and came with a complete client-server implementation right out of the box.
I was able to set up a server on my own workstation and then access it from any workstation in my division at the time. Yet, I couldn't convince anyone to consider the system for future development as it was not moving in a SQL Language direction.
I spoke with one of the developers of the system at Emerald Bay back then and they believed that SQL was inefficient and wasn't worth the effort to develop a layer for their database system.
This single decision destroyed the company very quickly as they entire database world at that time was moving to the SQL Language in one way or another...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I think that's sort of sad considering that several years later lots of people moved away from SQL to "nosql" databases.
For the record I'm male, I do get mistaken for a woman a lot, both online and off, so no worries. I'm just genderweird.
I'm not that young either - i put a teenager through college. He's grown now. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Thanks to all your great advice (really appreciated) I was able to find out what is wrong with my laptop... By calling Dell tech support
First of all, great support, best I've ever had, perfect 5 out of 7!
So the problem seems to be that my computer has an SSD and an HDD and I was thinking it only had an SSD and my computer was thinking it only had an HDD.
At startup the laptop did a hardware check, which apparently takes a long time, but which can be turned off in the BIOS.
Anyway, the SSD could not be found, which is obviously a problem.
The slow startup time is mostly just due to Windows being installed in the HDD instead of the SSD I was expecting.
Long story short, I'm still within warranty and an engineer will come to install a new SSD and, if that doesn't fix it, a new motherboard.
Case closed (I hope) 
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Three warf hoorah for Dell 
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Did you try enabling or disabling legacy boot mode?
If not enabled, it can cause problems with efi drives; and if enabled, it it can cause problems with non-efi drives.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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