Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

I have been strongly considering writing a small fb app today named something along the lines of "Hack your fb friends - for realz". Then add basic oauth (You have to login to pick the friend to hack duh), retrieve their friends list and then publicly post to their own timeline and the friends they chose humorously stating they attempted to hack the persons account "for realz". You know just enough to alert people that the "hacker" is a idiot with bad intentions but with just humour enough to fall under "satire" so fb doesn't remove it.

If your bored please feel free steal and implement my idea, it's hereby open sourced and I will even fund this shit on kickstarter 😂

OK I've just got an idea that I think would be quite neat:

How about a virtual rubber duck that sits in the corner of your editor? Just like the gem in old Word, if you remember. It's yellow and quacks sometimes, and nods understandingly when you talk to it (mic monitoring).

And it also monitors your typing and says (popup text bubble) things like:
"those parentheses doesn't look balanced to me"
"did you really initialize that variable?"
"you wrote JASON again"
"you forgot the ;"

You get the point.

I don't have time to implement, feel free to steal my idea and become a millionaire.

Ideas I've had over the years that could pan out and be useful:

SMS-DB: Stands for SMS-Data Burst. Used to allow those with low cell signal or no data plan to transfer data between a phone and some client via the standard SMS text space. Would be slow, but would act kinda like dial-up over SMS (as mobile lines are compressed on all service levels, even LTE, so traditional dial-up wouldn't work!) I have a general idea on how packets would be laid out, but that's about it so far...

everything2PNG: Allows one to transpose any file's data into a PNG with a 3 byte per pixel (full color RGB), which allows for a "compression" of sorts (about 91, 93% on preliminary tests) AND allowing further, more efficient compression of the resulting file. (Plus... it's just kinda cool to see files transposed as PNGs.) I actually have a simple transposer to go to PNG, but can't yet go back. Large files (around 600MB) use upwards of 4GB with efficient paging and other optimizations via NumPy so far, so it's not *viable* yet, but it's coming along nicely.

RPi-GPIO Interconnection Bus: A master/slave or round robin method to allow for Raspberry Pis to communicate using GPIO, which can help free up network bandwidth in RPi cloud computing clusters. At most, this'd allow for 4 bits used for pushing to the GPIO "bus", and 4 bits used for pulling from the "bus". 8 pins total are usually unused minimum, so either 3 or 4 pins for upload, 3 or 4 for download, and potentially 1 or 2 for commands, general non-data communication, etc. I made a version of this concept using Round Robin for a client, but it was horribly slow. (I also don't have distribution rights for the code, so i'm working from scratch.) Definitely doable.