About two months or three ago I stupidly changed my password to my only account to a password I promptly forgot. I was losing it when I realized what I had done. To make matters worse, I did this change a day before our office was scheduled to move to automated backups via Time Machine.
Luckily after some digging I came across this fix and was back in to my computer, albeit a little shaken up by the back door.
It comes off as a parable about the fact that we write for our peers and our employers. We may aspire to be academics, but unless our peers and employers are academics, a highly technical, academic approach to problems will fail.
I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and aside from fluid navigation, it isn’t worth the hassle. Since the content is largely text which will be transformed into HTML (before or after being sent down the pipe), the size difference is mostly negligible.
Time is better spent cleaning up the critical rendering path, deferring styles and scripts.
I used to use these questions to interview candidate but found it to be really off putting and not terribly helpful.
What’s more important than their answers to these questions is how they got there. Have they vertically centered an element so many times it seems second nature? Did they find it in an unsubstantiated StackOverflow post? Did they write a C program to lay it all out using spans?
The bigger computer science questions are what you need answers to and I’d love to see some front end questions which address these, not minute trivia that will likely change down the road.
An example that irritates me to no end is the Playstation store.
Opening links in a new tab/window means reloading the entire store app, usually taking at least 15 seconds.
Likely this slow load is due to the broad scope of the app. I’ve found Angular works very well for medium sized apps, but isn't it aimed at solving the massive complexity and spaghetti code of larger applications?
I’ve found that many fringe devices cannot render many Angular apps in their browsers. This includes many current/previous generation game consoles (3DS, Wii U, PS3), less capable tablets, etc. I'm not sure whether its the browsers lacking certain Javascript language features, but its irritating for a "mobile" friendly framework to not work across a broad spectrum of devices.