# Are web developers any good in times of war?

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2016/07/19/are-web-developers-any-good-in-times-of-war/
- Published: 2016-07-19T10:24:19+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

Does CSS have any worth for an army officer? I personally guess not, from the front
end we’ll end up directly on the front! If all your skills are about HTML and CSS
you future might be bleak. Maybe some colonel will want a personal website, i don’t
know like a thumbnail gallery of AK models, they’ll use and then dispose you as 
a liability in the attack line of some distant battle.

Damn you Erdogan! I knew a had to learn Python faster!

My Node experience could come in handy, I could spell it out as “real time services
building”, that should be worth something, a war force must use real time services.
OK, one point scored.

PHP? Oh my god. not really. I mean I bet the military IT guy who reviews the recruit
records hates PHP. He must since he or she probably still does FORTRAN and COBOL.
What, you don’t really think the person analyzing your file is some NSA computer
guy? Ha ha. No it will be some low ranking person, who still uses huge floppy disks
I bet!

Ruby? Worthless. No one cares for your elegance in the army, sorry. Numbers are 
objects … what is this, mutiny? Mixins? When you have a chain of command? Hell no!

Hmm, maybe Javascript will score me some points, because of node. I’m sure our beloved
Internets will revert to text mode, as the luxury of 1 Gbps at home will be long
gone. But even then, mind you, shall you ever code for the army with JS there will
be no framework to have your back. In the army $ means something else and you don’t
have it.

Hmm. Add to your file gulp, sass, less, webpack, react, angular, cordova, responsive,
flat, canvas buzz buzz buzz zz zz zzz, when the recruit person wakes up you’ll get
dispatched to washing the dishes, which is not bad.

Oh, you have Agile process experience? In the army Agile will get you court martial-
ed in no time. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools? Think again
soldier! Responding to change over following a plan? Gimme 20 push ups son, maybe
SCRUM will sweat out of you!

I know! I’ll rephrase my vagrant pains as “virtualization of workstations for efficient
distribution of software development environments”. That sounds good, sounds important.

Unlike, say, my experience setting up AWS and EC2, those are property of the US 
army so I’ll have to revert to booting some Apache on Lenovos again. You don’t want
to tell your commanding officer the enemy’s technology is better and more practical,
unless you like solitary!

I also think in case of war, finally, SVN will have a comeback. Huzzah! I mean, 
fast branching? Who authorized that branch? Did you get the permit to pull from 
master? Damn it son, do that again and you’ll cook so much oat meals you’ll be dreaming
them at night.

One thing that makes me smile: can you imagine online marketers? Social media managers?
What will they ever do for their country without all those cookies?