You're over-thinking it, dark-noodz. Truth is subjective, opinionated, and bears no relation to facts. It is an abstract concept that serves a lot of different emotional purposes - from manipulation by corporate windbags all the way back to how you perceive yourself.
We often conflate "truth" with "comfort" or "validation" because we're human.
When companies want their employees to be "truth seekers", they generally expect employees to act responsibly, honestly, and either willing to go with the flow (truth for the company) or challenge the norms (truth for the individual) - good luck figuring out which one they actually want at any given moment in time.
What is truth? It's what I tell myself to feel better about what I see around me. It changes all the time, reflects and contradicts itself under different circumstances, and rarely matches up with other people's perception of truth.
Truth is what companies and individuals use to justify their actions - not facts, but truths.
It's funny, but you can replace every "truth" above with "lie" and it will remain a truth and a lie.
The only paragraph you wrote that was truthful was the second-to-last one.
This might be Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and not insomnia. I suffered from it for years and years before I was able to train myself into falling asleep. And then I suffered from sleep apnea for years and years before getting diagnosed and getting a CPAP machine.
I recommend learning JavaScript, not a framework to begin with, and especially not something that smurfs with the DOM paradigm as much as React does. Learning React will make you a React developer, not a Front End developer.
Once you have a firm grasp of the DOM and browser quirks and have figured out how to write an efficient {insert simple/intermediate component here}, move on to custom HTML components using LitHTML or Svelte or some such. Once you grok what's going on there, you're ready for any framework you want :)
This is fine. In our situation we also kept a couple of summary tables in the regular database so we could track things that we commonly queried (like total visits per country, authenticated visits, etc.
Before I left we also started tracking every hit but with less information on a weekly rotating basis - so we could always query the last 7 days of logs, but only needed to store about 20% of the information in the full log. It added to the cost a little bit, but queries within the 7 day limit were effectively free, which Support and Analytics loved :)
Literally the only reason I pay for YT Premium is to get rid of ads. I don't use any other features of it - I just don't want ads. The modern web is so bad that premium services only need to be ad-free and I will pay. Make all the features free, and just let me pay to never see any ads ever again. I cannot state clearly enough that I literally use _no_ YTP features, I just enjoy the ad-free experience. Did I mention that advertising on the modern web is absolutely broken and is ruining the enjoyment of web browsing? Is "browsing" even still a thing for people? Fucking ads :(
I've never dived (dove? doven?) into the output of an HTML minimizer, but I assumed this was one of the things it would do - remove all optional tags while retaining the same DOM tree output.
You could do a custom WP plugin that provides a single page with everything they need. It doesn't have to be in the admin section, just a password-protected page. That way you stay with WP (which will likely be supported for many more years) and PHP (which will never, ever die) :)
It varies, same as so many things :) You can concentrate on finding work within a narrow range where you feel expert in, or spread the net wider and take on work that lets you learn new things as well. You might have a lot of domain experience (eg. financial, construction, real estate, etc.) that you can leverage into finding work, or intentionally find things outside your comfort zone.
We make our own prisons, so to speak, and freelancing can be as restrictive or as freeing as you make it (market conditions may dictate some of this, though).
I usually freelance within a single tech stack and closely related tech, but cast a wide net as far as the type of business goes (music, financial, AI, real estate, legal - all are industries I have some experience with now, and many more).
React is what happens when you misunderstand the purpose (and principle) of web components, then double-down and encourage framework-related libraries to sprout up around it.
React is what gets used by companies who didn't do enough due diligence into deciding on the best tools for the job.
I've worked with React and find it endlessly annoying and arbitrarily designed for the most part (in a modern development context - probably it didn't seem so randomly assembled back when it was still relatively new).
You wait until you line up something better. Or until you save enough to support your lifestyle for a year. Or until you decide to say "screw it" and live in a shack on a mountain near a stream until society smartens up.
The problem isn't limited to people learning frameworks instead of languages; I work with developers who don't know the network stack at all - no concept (beyond the bare basics) of how their code gets from a server to a browser and the steps between and the related technology. When I ask things like "does the server support HTTP/2 or /3" or "can you setup a local certificate so we can use https for localhost" I almost invariable get blank stares (or long pauses on Teams/Slack) and a question in reply: "Where do I look for that?"
Agreed. My company puts out terrible code that only mostly works. I was literally laughed at when I suggested we start documenting things and adding tests. This is a dev team of around 30 people who still have to site through a morning "stand up" every day, who are never given enough time to do quality work, and where only 3 devs are trusted to merge code and make deployments. Until recently, they were also the only devs who were able to generate API keys for certain, necessary third-party APIs, so if your key stopped working and they weren't in, you were completely blocked until one of them showed up.
There are devs here who have been "junior" for 4+ years, and senior devs with less than 2 years of experience - all learning and teaching the same bad habits and bad code to each other. A few months ago I did a Lunch N' Learn showing some JS features and when I showed how to use `.map` in place of a for...each loop for certain situations, it blew more than one mind - which in turn blows my mind. These are "senior" front-end devs who never new that things like `map`, `find`, and `filter` existed. They haven't actually _used_ any of these features since then either, and I have been labelled "picky" when I point out how to change their 10 line block into a 3 line block during code reviews. I doubled-down on that label when I noted that converting observables to promises (these are Angular applications) was a bit of an anti-pattern, and all our inter-application communication is completely unsecured and 100% open for abuse.
This company is not interested in improving things and is actively in a code-based death spiral towards unmaintainable complexity caused by terrible management and ignorant (but friendly and likeable) product owners. When I put together a proposal or plan to improve something (like switching to a message service instead of relying on inter-iframe messages), the first question I get asked (by 3 different people, no less) is how I had time to put that together (it took about 30 minutes); didn't I have better work to be doing?
But I can't find another job, so here I sit, witnessing the slow tech-death of their little universe, doing what I can to not go down with it too far. I am atrophying and can't stop it.