Imo, those were the times of unbounded creativity. With the limited, primitive tools, devs (webmasters?) of that era achieved great results.
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.
Polymorph | Lead Engineer (Frontend) | Full-time | Bangalore, India | Onsite | ₹20L-₹25L
Polymorph (https://getpolymorph.com/) provides a machine-learning driven revenue intelligence platform. Our customers include Mozilla, Viber, Disqus, Verve and the likes. Our team has built a very high traffic and low latency prediction engine. We have offices in San Francisco, CA and Bangalore, India.
We are looking for a lead engineer at our Bangalore office to drive the engineering efforts on our client-facing portal. The primary responsibilities will include preparing technical specifications for product features, planning engineering sprints and tracking progress. As a lead, you will be expected to inspire with your engineering skills as well as mentor team members under your wing.
Required Skills:
* 5+ years of experience building large-scale web applications
* Very strong in React, Redux, Redux Saga
* Expert in the ES6+ ecosystem: Babel, Webpack, npm, yarn, et al
* Experience writing unit tests with Mocha, Enzyme, Jest, Chai, Sinon
* Familiarity with at least one of these server-side technologies: Django (preferred), Ruby on Rails, NodeJS
* Experience with Git, Jenkins, CircleCI, AWS
* First-rate verbal and written communication skills
Yeah, I guess I started off the hard (wrong?) way. The first few websites I built was typed out on notepad. Progress was slow and excruciatingly difficult. Then, I discovered FrontPage and my productivity went through the roof :) Of course, the markup generated was garbage. I understood none of it and for all I knew, this was the way forward!
FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow.
At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).
Ah! Those were the days when there were no admins, there were 'webmasters'! They were the people behind building and maintaining the website. Think webdev + ops. Nothing today compares to the grandeur of being a 'Webmaster' in 1996 :)
Jasc PSP 5 was the first full-blown image editor I ever used. Those were the days when I was taking baby steps with web design. Absolutely loved the no-nonsense, workflow. Not to mention, it seemed to pack every feature imaginable in a small, cheap package!
I consulted for a certain 'unicorn startup' based in India during their stealth stage. I joined another (now defunct) startup as employee #2. Worked my @$$ off for 3 years before I called it quits. From my own experience:
Pros:
- No layers of management BS
- Startups seem to be more flexible about work hours and remote work
- More wiggle room to experiment; open to embracing new tech
Cons:
- Inexperienced leads, managers, CXOs. I can't stress this enough.
- Uncertainty. You gotta have a bag packed, ready to hit the streets at short notice
- Slog it out as an 'early employee' for years and watch the company go down the drain. That is the story of most startups. The chances of making it big are astronomically low.
Polymorph (http://getpolymorph.com/) provides a machine-learning driven revenue intelligence platform. Our customers include Mozilla, Viber, Disqus, Gfycat, Streamable, Axios, Cheetah Mobile and the likes. Our team built a very high traffic and low latency prediction engine. We have offices in San Francisco, CA and Bangalore, India.
We are looking for a Python/Django engineer at our Bangalore office to work on our client-facing portal. The primary tasks will include writing microservices and optimizing/extending our real-time reporting engine.
Required Skills:
* 2+ years of professional experience developing web
applications using Python + Django + Django Rest Framework
A big chunk of modern websites lack character and look nearly the same to me. I know - consistency, principle of least surprise, et al. Maybe it is just me, but designing a website engaged more of my creative juices and certainly felt like more fun 20y ago.
Say what you will about the Flash website boom of the early 2000s, creative design did peak at the time. Discovering a new site and wowing over the unique design and interactions is an experience lost in time.