Fortnightly Programming Q&A Thread

As someone who was in a similar position not too long ago, I can offer some of my own perspective and advice.

Make sure you maintain industry best practices. This is both for the benefit of the organisation and also for yourself. As a sole operator it is really easy to take the shortest route to completion and develop on-the-fly.
Use git [or some form of vcs], have a sane development, test and deployment pipeline. Given your resources, you can only do so much. Not saying you need to have a huge CI system with every bell and whistle, but have some procedure in place which states how things are done.

Make sure your work passes the 'bus test'. If you were hit by a bus tonight, how would things be able to continue? As I said this isn't just for the organisation but also to make sure you keep yourself skilled and up to date. Things move fast in the software world, today's popular framework or paradigm is quickly replaced by something new. It's easy to get comfortable if a job is simple and you're on your own, but there's a reason these positions earn the title of being 'golden handcuffs'.

I guess where I'm going with it all is that, make sure that if or when you need to move to another job, you are in a good position to do so. I moved from a small near-one-person-show to a large department, primarily as I still had good knowledge and experience.

Honestly, if you don't have the managers and team members around you, just make the most of it! Focus on the technology and find the best ones to suit your needs.

Just make sure that your superiors actually understand what you do for when future potential employers call them up.

While a custom CMS sounds like it should be a positive on a resume, it actually doesn't help much. Lots of hiring is based on your familiarity with common frameworks, so if you can integrate with some of the bigger ones it would be better for your career.

I'm basically in the same shoes as you right now, and a while back I tried my luck on the jobs market and was surprised at how little traction I got. That's a small part of why I decided to go back to school. The class I am taking right now has made me realize that the job that better describes what we do is actually that of an Analyst, so I'm making that my title. But I'm happier with my current job than I was in the past, so I won't know how effective it will be until much later.

Firstly, no managers and no colleagues? You lucky bastard!

Seconldy, what kind of advice are you looking for exactly? It's not quite obvious from your post.

My understanding is that width:100%; means "100% of the width of the closest relative-positioned block parent element, or root element". If you want to guarantee an element is the width of the viewport, width:100vw; is what you want.

AFAIK width generally defaults to 'auto', which isn't really the same as '100%'.

I am not sure about ed, but in vim you would add a g flag to the end of the command. That may be worth a try. So your command would change to:

/BEGIN/,/END/gc

As a side question, why ed instead of vim or any of its gui adaptations?

The former having -with-lease helps some and it further "protects" more than a naked --force-with-lease (which I normally use) against you (or some program) running git fetch without you realizing after someone else had pushed to origin/foo but before you can confirmed you're okay with the force push.

but something I have done is making my content render under my header

position: absolute

Long story short: all content in HTML relies on something called the box model. It's why display: block elements – <h1>, <div>, <header> – take up all the width available and push the following content "down".

When you position an element absolutely, not only do you make it stick to a set of coordinates within the page, you also take it out of the box model. This means that content will no longer pay attention to it when it comes to considering their own place on the page. In other words, what used to be a large block that takes up space, is no longer a block taking up space, as far as the rest of your content is concerned.

If you do want your content to consider the large block, don't make the block use position: absolute.

What was it that you meant to achieve using absolute positioning? There are different recommendations to what you want to achieve, and I think I know what you wanted to do. Since you're still learning, I'd like you to verbalize your goals on your own, because that's how you come to understand the problem you're trying to solve via web design. The more you talk through the stuff you're working with, the quicker you'll understand it.

One of the things I've learned over the years of working fighting with CSS is that one is absolutely unable to do the classical header-content-footer trio right without CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid. You can see an example of how I do it with Flexbox on my personal website. The CSS is inline and mostly well-documented. The basic gist of it is:

<!-- main.xhtml -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<!-- … -->
<body>
<header><!-- … --></header>
<main><!-- … --></main>
<footer><!-- … --></footer>
</body>
</html>

/* main.css  */
html { height: 100%; }
body { display: flex; flex-direction: column; height: 100%; margin: 0; }
main { flex-grow: 1; }

Demo: https:// codepen.io/Ainar-G/pen/abbBGPj.

Hopefully, this helps.