Web dev is still fun if you want it to be

Summary

The Dumbest Thing I Could Do This is the repo for the code powering Best of Best of the Worst, a silly, simple ranking system created purely for my own amusement and the entertainment of other fans. In this README I will outline what I did, how I did it, and why I did it that way. Here Begins The Rambling I don't remember the first time I thought, "shit, I'm old now". But in the dense band of such occasions which thereafter followed, I know that one such thought was immediately preceded by "gee, developing web apps sucks now". When I was younger you could follow a problem anywhere it led in the code and solve it, either yourself or with the help of teammates. But now web dev means teams and committees and tense video meetings and back channel haggling and design documents at twenty paces. "Depressing" fails to capture the despair this engenders in the way that "bored" incompletely describes any child after 30 seconds waiting in a line without a screen. So when I set out to write this little bit of code, I thought: I want to play a bit, sure, but I want to keep it simple. I'm just pissfarting around here. No need to be formal and fancy. This is for fun, not professional completeness. And so, by weird coincidence, I stepped into a time machine that zapped me back to 2007. An era so distant that Facebook was a website and we were still living with the mutant offspring of the 90s and the War on Terror. What happened is that I made some basic technology choices: The site needs to be stupidly simple, I don't want a full MVC parade. OK, I'll use Sinatra. I guess that rules out Rails, but thank god it also rules out ActiveRecord. I suppose I'll use Sequel. I want to use a cheap VPS and my site will get bugger-all traffic. OK, I'll use SQLite. SQLite was released in 2000. Sinatra and Sequel were released in 2007. I had fallen into the magic cave and stumbled out the other side into a world where HTML was the main show and not just a family embarrassment that had to be stoica...