Help me explain my job to my dad.
March 4, 2010 6:55 PM   Subscribe

I'm a front end web developer. My dad is a 65 year old newspaper printer. I'm having a hell of a time explaining to him what i do. The biggest problem is getting him to understand how servers, search engines, and browsers work. Him, "now where do you put the website?"
posted by Paleoindian to Technology (8 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is he interested in some level of the technical details, or just a conceptual idea of what you do and how it relates to the Internet?
posted by secret about box at 7:00 PM on March 4, 2010


What's your actual question? I haven't been able to explain my job to my dad for several years. I leave it as "I talk about databases, and stuff".
posted by pompomtom at 7:05 PM on March 4, 2010


website:newspaper::CMS:typesetters::front end web developer:press manufacturer

Maybe that will help it get it.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 7:09 PM on March 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


My folks have a very vague idea of what I do. This is true with most of my friends too.

In your case, these might help.
a) Blogs in plain English
b) WWW in plain English.
posted by special-k at 7:15 PM on March 4, 2010 [2 favorites]


My grandfather had a very, very hard time understanding anything that wasn't "physical". E-mail had to be a "thing", as well as your inbox. So where were those "things"?

I think it's helpful to explore the abstraction here- We're still using words like "mail" and "inbox", but they no longer point to real objects. They point to electronic signals. I think re-connoting the notion of "things" went a long way towards helping him.
posted by GilloD at 7:58 PM on March 4, 2010


Best answer: I routinely explained this stuff to seniors as part of a Computer Graphics course I taught (when we got into web graphics).

The trick at the time was to tell them:

1. Let's say you make a cool picture
2. You put this software called "Apache" on your computer
3. Every computer on the internet, has an address on the internet
4. With this Apache software, people can type in your computer's address and they see your picture.

Key: Don't say "server," ignore the fact that most people have firewalls preventing this crap, don't talk about "domain names" until later, when you say:

1. Your computer's address is a really long number that's hard to remember.
2. To make it easy for people to connect to your computer, there's a big list out there on the internet, like a phone book.
3. When you type in "grandpaswebsite.com", the computer looks on the list and finds the entry for "grandpaswebsite.com". The entry has grandpa's number-address in it, like a phonebook.

Now, what if you want to share more than just a picture of two guys out fishing? What if you want to share a whole newspaper from your computer?

1. You hire a web designer
2. The web designer makes a document out of text and images (because one big image would take people too long to download and what if you're blind? the computer can't read a photo to you, etc.).
3. The web designer has a hard time, because his newspaper has to look the same on all sorts of different computers, some of which might even be made in China (grandpa nods deeply), and the screens are all kinds of sizes, cell phones, huge TVs, etc.
4. The web designer gets paid because he knows how to work with images AND text AND make it look good AND make it work fine no matter who is looking at it from wherever on the internet.
5. The web designer also makes it so people can actually talk back to the newspaper. He makes it so you can see other peoples comments about the articles. (there's your front end, lol)

None of this passes geek scrutiny -- geeks will tear this crap apart. But my seniors always ate it up. Then they'd go back and kick 40-year-old butt in their web classes.
posted by circular at 11:39 PM on March 4, 2010 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Oh, and I'd eventually say "there's a big room down in LA just like this computer lab, where there are racks and racks of computers just running Apache, and we call the company that owns that room a 'web host,' and they make it so you can have your website on THEIR computers so you can turn your home computer off at night and people around the world can still see your website."

And you rent one of those computers for $6 a month, and you just send your files to it and it is like your own little computer just for your website, etc.

And then at night while you're sleeping, Google has a little software program that goes around and checks in on all the websites, and sees if they have changed anything.

And then when Google finds your name on your website, they add it to their catalog. So when people type in your name into Google, Google shows them your website, just because they think that might be helpful.
posted by circular at 11:47 PM on March 4, 2010 [4 favorites]


Web developer = Type-setter
Server = Printing press
Internet = Paperboy
Firewall = Editor
Computer Screen = Paper
Rupert Murdoch = William Randolph Hearst?
posted by jasondigitized at 11:00 AM on March 5, 2010


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