I am a Web Developer / Designer.

[MrGray]

Fair enough you cant be a master of both but there are good web designer and developers that are better then most.

@garp I thought we were talking about just web design and web development since the thread is about web design and web development. I don't know anyone who can design great web layouts and code c++ and php. But what web developer would need to know c++ or the workings on linux.

Fair enough, although not directly relevant, exactly these skills are what made the big successful platforms so effective. At the time Facebook became successful there were 70000 similar in concept sites that did much the same thing. The difference between them and a site like Facebook, was that the Facebook developers had the ability to re-compile their own custom version of php(?) and apache to work across multiple servers, thereby allowing the site to scale easily which was the downfall of any other similar site that started becoming successful. (BTW, you will see this pattern repeated across all the major sites - they were successful because they found a way to scale their platforms due to to having top notch developer skills available while most competitors ground to a halt or crashed when they hit a million users. Facebook runs across something like 250000 servers.)

 

[mcryan]

Fair enough you cant be a master of both but there are good web designer and developers that are better then most.

@garp I thought we were talking about just web design and web development since the thread is about web design and web development. I don't know anyone who can design great web layouts and code c++ and php. But what web developer would need to know c++ or the workings on linux.

My background is software development. Mostly Java - and I have moved into the web development realm focussing heavily on PHP and advanced Javascript. I can design a very nice web layout, but I am much more effective at handling the back end. I can do both, I do both but I do best at the backend stuff.

 

[matthew-]

Fair enough, although not directly relevant, exactly these skills are what made the big successful platforms so effective. At the time Facebook became successful there were 70000 similar in concept sites that did much the same thing. The difference between them and a site like Facebook, was that the Facebook developers had the ability to re-compile their own custom version of php(?) and apache to work across multiple servers, thereby allowing the site to scale easily which was the downfall of any other similar site that started becoming successful. (BTW, you will see this pattern repeated across all the major sites - they were successful because they found a way to scale their platforms due to to having top notch developer skills available while most competitors ground to a halt or crashed when they hit a million users. Facebook runs across something like 250000 servers.)

Facebook as a social networking site is very simple, scaling a site well would require great server engineers, they use Apache Cassandra for there databases, and Software Developers in creating those systems.
Any site written even in PHP can be scaled to handle million of users. I would rather use PHP then C++ ETC to create a high scalability site. That's just my preference.

You can either be a great WEB DEVELOPER or a great SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. using the same framework of logic as AcidRaZor

 

[EthanEllis]

Fair enough, although not directly relevant, exactly these skills are what made the big successful platforms so effective. At the time Facebook became successful there were 70000 similar in concept sites that did much the same thing. The difference between them and a site like Facebook, was that the Facebook developers had the ability to re-compile their own custom version of php(?) and apache to work across multiple servers, thereby allowing the site to scale easily which was the downfall of any other similar site that started becoming successful. (BTW, you will see this pattern repeated across all the major sites - they were successful because they found a way to scale their platforms due to to having top notch developer skills available while most competitors ground to a halt or crashed when they hit a million users. Facebook runs across something like 250000 servers.)

Hrmm facebook only made hiphop in 2008 http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358/ while facebook itself started in 2004. So facebook already had built its success for over 4 years then only come up with this hiphop idea.

The whole point of this hiphop is to take what the php developers have created and convert it to c++ for faster load time. Fair enough this is pretty cool and the developer who made that must be a great developer. However the people writing the actual facebook features are php developers. The fact that they actually write facebook in PHP to then automatically compile it to more performant C++ also shows how powerful PHP is… even if it takes a performance hit for being an uncompiled scripting language.

My point is that the facebook developers use php. A web developer only needs to code in php and javascript to create something the size of facebook. C++ and all those other languages are sort of irrelevant in web development.

 

[MrGray]

Facebook as a social networking site is very simple, scaling a site well would require great server engineers, they use Apache Cassandra for there databases, and Software Developers in creating those systems.
Any site written even in PHP can be scaled to handle million of users. I would rather use PHP then C++ ETC to create a high scalability site. That's just my preference.

You can either be a great WEB DEVELOPER or a great SOFTWARE DEVELOPER. using the same framework of logic as AcidRaZor

Correction, they developed Cassandra for Facebook. They then open sourced it and it became the Apache Cassandra project. Their programming skills are what allowed Facebook to happen. Yes, it may be easier nowadays to create a php site that can be scaled to handle millions of users, but that is only because of tools that these guys developed in making their sites scale - many of their improvements have been included in php and Apache.

To me a web developer is a web designer/developer - someone with a bit of both, usually stronger in one but generally never great in both. This gets the job done 99% of the time. Remember, the original argument was whether or not you can be a great designer and a great developer - well, you can be a great web developer which is a bit of both, but a great software developer is a different creature altogether

 

[MrGray]

Hrmm facebook only made hiphop in 2008 http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358/ while facebook itself started in 2004. So facebook already had built its success for over 4 years then only come up with this hiphop idea.

Hiphop is only one aspect of what they did, before that they were doing things like hacking the Zend engine and using memcached to the max. Btw in 2007 they only had 30 million users, I think, so it's not like they already had half a billion users and then decided to develop hiphop.

 

[MrGray]

Facebook as a social networking site is very simple

Okay, if you say so... made your own, much, lately?

 

[EthanEllis]

@garp "Remember, the original argument was whether or not you can be a great designer and a great developer - well, you can be a great web developer which is a bit of both, but a great software developer is a different creature altogether"

I was under the impression the original argument was if you could be a great web designer and web developer. This is a thread about web design and web development so why would start talking about other development languages.

My personal opinion is that you can be a great web designer and web developer like http://www.matthieudufour.com/ who designs does motion graphics and can develop in php and javascript.

 

[MrGray]

@EthanEllis I also said that they are usually stronger in either design or development and never "great" in both.

 

[XWare]

@garp "Remember, the original argument was whether or not you can be a great designer and a great developer - well, you can be a great web developer which is a bit of both, but a great software developer is a different creature altogether"

I was under the impression the original argument was if you could be a great web designer and web developer. This is a thread about web design and web development so why would start talking about other development languages.

My personal opinion is that you can be a great web designer and web developer like http://www.matthieudufour.com/ who designs does motion graphics and can develop in php and javascript.

Agreed, the topic is about WEB design & development. And you can do both pretty well to make decent websites that clients will pay good money for.

 

[matthew-]

Okay, if you say so... made your own, much, lately?

I won't reveal to much but yes I have created my own social network, currently in private alpha.
I created one using functions, and the other I created using Object Orientated PHP 2 different backend versions.
The only hard part about it really is the marketing and getting users and monetizing the site. As you'll see twitter has only started monetizing there site with 'promoted trends' & promoted tweets'.

 

[Shayd]

matthew i sent you a pm...

 

[MrGray]

I won't reveal to much but yes I have created my own social network, currently in private alpha.
I created one using functions, and the other I created using Object Orientated PHP 2 different backend versions.
The only hard part about it really is the marketing and getting users and monetizing the site. As you'll see twitter has only started monetizing there site with 'promoted trends' & promoted tweets'.

Okay, well then kudos to you. Hope you give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money. I admire vision, but sometimes it needs to be tempered with reality, especially if it stems from naivety, but if you really have a Facebook class platform, more power to you. You do know, though, that there are an estimated 100000+ social network startups at any point in time that all believe they have their own unique "angle" and that scaling and funding problems are the biggest hurdles, that is to say, if you manage to get something that (I hate this phrase) "goes viral"? Just saying...

 

[matthew-]

Okay, well then kudos to you. Hope you give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money. I admire vision, but sometimes it needs to be tempered with reality, especially if it stems from naivety, but if you really have a Facebook class platform, more power to you. You do know, though, that there are an estimated 100000+ social network startups at any point in time that all believe they have their own unique "angle" and that scaling and funding problems are the biggest hurdles, that is to say, if you manage to get something that (I hate this phrase) "goes viral"? Just saying...

I just built my social networking platform for fun It still has a few kinks here and there. But I'm sure once I release it the the public I'll get a few hits here and there. I was more interested to see how a social network is built so I built one myself, mine is a blatant rip off of facebook but with improvement's that I felt where lacking. Funding etc can all be achieved hell even digg.com was worth $80 000 000.00 at one stage now it's sites like quora.com(est value $84 000 000.00) etc that the people are flocking to. To get something to go viral just takes the right execution and should be something that people want. It's all engineered.

Just so you know I'm working on an advertising platform like adwords & adsense. Hey if google can be worth $120 000 000 000.00, I can create a company worth that amount to with luck.
Many people said it was impossible to reach the moon but they did. I just hope I have a good future ahead of me.

 

[matthew-]

All the best, there is TONS of work out there at the moment.

That statement is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!

 

[MikeJThompson]

Hello I'm new to this site.
Well I'm looking for a Job.

My skills are.
x(HTML).
CSS.
JAVASCRIPT.
AJAX.
PHP.
mySQL.

I can design a site from the ground up, and develop the back end.
My passion is the web and creating platforms for it.

If you have a server a domain name and project you have in mind I can start working on it right now.

My web host canceled my server show I can't show you the projects I've created.
I am working on a Social Question and Answer site like quora.com which is valued at 84 million dollars. So if you have a business mind. I'm the developer for you.
I have the skills, waiting for them to be used.

I am located in Johannesburg.

Can you contact me in private message?

 

[MikeJThompson]

That statement is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!

You can try freelancer dot com also. I use that for outsource.