Thursday, November 6, 2014

Today I learned: My most painfully learned, hard to write blog post is the one, that help most people.

I did not write much so far in this. About one article per month or so. Mostly boring stuff, stuff, that does not even interest me any longer. (Who cares about my web projects some two years ago? I do. But only me does.)

But there are some articles, which took long work. Which meant a great amount of work and learning. And one of the most painful and hard-to-grasp article, which took me even quite a long to write (oh boy, I remember hating formatting that article so much...), leaving me with a feeling of "sooo... Nobody has this problem, but me. Nobody is interested in my stuff. So why did I even spend time for writing this?".

I still remember how it happened, that I wrote this article: I struggled massively building a facebook-timeline-like visualization of the history of an order in the web-based license-creation app for my employer. I just could not get the positioning of the elements to work correctly. Not by CSS (hey, that was 2012, so flexbox was unheard of), not by some javascript magic i could figure it out. Then it clicked. It had something to do this the browsers layouting engine. So if I just postponed the position calculation after the layouting has been done by the browser, I could calcalute all that stuff correctly and would not have to deal with some strange zero-pixel heights of divs.

So I wrote that article.

So have a comparison, how much this article stands out relative to other articles I wrote: In an all-time count, this article has over 7000 views. The second place, also an article about web development, has only 370 views.

But what surprised me today, that that AngularJS-related article is still being actively linked an clicked.
It seems, that I was absolutely wrong about with my thought about the uselessness of that article. I was horribly wring. This small article, although it was hard to learn, is now a help to others.

And that is just wonderful.

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