Stuff they don't teach in school...

I think one of the themes that I want to write about consistently should be called "The stuff they don't teach you in school." I'll be honest, "stuff" isn't my first choice of words, but I'll keep this family friendly even though I never expect kids to read it. Mom might read it one day (Hi Mom!).

Austin Community College has unique programs for the tech industry where they give associate degrees in tech by loading four semesters full of tech classes instead of the customary "basics" that most college students take their freshman and sophomore year. My only English class was technical writing. My plan required me to take one arts class, one history or government class, one speech class and one algebra class but I already have a bachelor’s degree and they counted previous work. The point is, you don't take much in the "normal" workload and instead take a tech intensive path. Out of the sixty required class hours, all but 15 are tech.

At this point, I need to recognize that this isn't the normal course, so maybe my theme needs to be "The stuff they didn't teach ME in school." Meh, whatever. The point is, as I embark on this journey, I'm discovering that there is a lot of stuff that they just kind of gloss over assuming you'll get it when you get a job. And yet, with the current state of the tech industry, there is no guarantee that you will get a job. I'm going into the post-graduation world with the idea that I might be freelancing for a while and, if that is the case, I'm ready to embrace it.

The very first thing I ran across in the "stuff they don't teach you?" Those pesky .htaccess files. I had one professor tell me that they should absolutely not EVER be included in your git commits, but that is it. Period. So now I'm wondering if a bootcamp would cover such a simple thing. Does a four-year CS degree cover it? It occurs to me that I should explain what a .htaccess file is, so if you need that explanation, check next week's blog post.

When I put the CSS Dallas website into production, I quickly discovered that all Apple devices labelling my website "insecure" even though it had a valid SSL certificate. Android phone showed it as secure. It was secure on PCs. You know the worst part? Liquid Web's documentation didn't have anything about on the first two pages of my search results, and Stack Overflow had a lot of answers that were just plain wrong. I had to lean on an experienced Sys Admin who was nice enough to do his own looking into the situation and found the solution. I was trying to write a redirect for the .htaccess file to force all products to redirect to HTTPS instead of HTTP; Simple, right? Well, I was having the redirect check the request itself (RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on [NC]), as every answer on the internet that I could find was telling me to do some version of this. Turns out, with the Liquid Web sites, the redirect needed to check the environmental variable {ENV: HTTPS} instead. And POOF, everything worked. The client really wanted their website to show secure, so that simple little line inside that file caused hours of heartache...not my first rodeo with the techache.

That is not even the last "stuff" situation that I've encountered, but I'll leave that for a future post.

Posted on: 2024-07-04 01:06:33.697197