Kyle Seth Gray

One of the most entertaining things is seeing someone who may be somewhat out of touch, or whose account is being run by a media team, tweeting something way out of line on Twitter.

That happened today with all the buzz surrounding Obama's plan for an open Internet (basically his little statement on Net Neutrality). Senator Ted Cruz from Texas had an interesting thing to say:

"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014

Politicians...

Meanwhile, The Oatmeal had a pretty fun response to this tweet:

Dear Senator Ted Cruz,

[Your tweet this morning] led me to assume one of two things:

Thing #1: When accepted campaign funds from telecom lobbyists last year, they asked that you publicly smear Net Neutrality.

Thing #2: You don't actually know what Net Neutrality is.

Politicians apparently love making statements that are just whatever helps them, or confuses their voters to blindly follow their "leadership". I'm not going to go into the politics of anything in this, but outright saying something like this, that doesn't make sense in the first place, is completely wrong and stupid. Yet these people are representing us in the Senate.

Yay America?

President Obama:

“Net neutrality” has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.

Say what you want about the President, but I am with Obama 100% on this. The Internet should be a public utility for everyone.

(via 512pixels.net)

Recently I started a web development job. After two months, nothing is more relevant than this paragraph by Peter Welch:

Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns.

It's been a month full of taking an entire week to find out the cause of this bug, finding some previous idiots in-line, (inside a freaking HTML img tag) javascript that has been terribly implemented all for a hover image effect, and CSS.

It's a lot different from a blog or funny website when you’re deploying your code in the real world, but it sure is a learning experience. You never would’ve thought some random ‘mark’ class in bootstrap was going to interfere with a page handed to you with code from someone you’ve never met, but suddenly you’re trying to figure out a work around while still maintaining the same functionality and not upsetting people.

My favorite little method I’ve learned is the band-aid method of testing. When you’re maintaining a website for a separate group, sometimes the best thing you can do to fix it is tear it off, and see if someone screams¹. 9/10 times, the weird feature was just by that old developer that no longer works there that you adore so, so much. And no one else will miss it when it’s gone.

^{1. Or emails you. Calls you. Calls someone else and blames them. Or hopefully just doesn’t notice.↩}