It's 1996 or so. The web is new. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) at the US Department of Transportation collects ontime arrival data for all the major airlines, by flight. It publishes some summary reports, but what people really want to see is how all the flights from, say, JFK to LAX performed in a given month.
The monthly database textfile is not that large, but it is unwieldy.
I'm a web consultant, but database backends are not yet a thing, at least not for us. Static webpages, all the way down.
So I use a script to parse the database into a series of text files and directories. E.g. JFK/index.html is a list of all the airports receiving flights from JFK, e.g. LAX, SFO, etc. And JFK/LAX.html is that month's results for all JFK to LAX flights. Etc.
As I recall, once I'd worked it out, it took 15 minutes to generate all those files on my Mac laptop, and then a little ftp action got the job done. Worked great, but someone did complain that we were polluting search results with so many pages for LAX, SFO, etc. etc. (SEO, sadly, was not really on our radar.)
That was replaced within a year by a php setup with a proper Oracle backend, and I had to explain to a DB admin what a weighted average was, but that's another story.
The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it can become another full-time job. At best it will be a consuming and challenging part-time task that requires ongoing skills.
I'd add now, mostly from unsuccessful experience, what does it take the first fan, and then the next one, and the one after that? For a lot of people, it's still some version of and then magic happens.
Bonus true story: I worked for an economic consulting/data/analytical software timesharing firm in the early '80s. They could see that PCs were going to be a huge threat, so they tried to sell "data kits". For instance (and I'm making up the numbers), for $50 you could buy a download of 10 years of GDP data or similar.
Their market logic was: if we just get 1% of the PC market, we'll be rich.
Hundreds of creators creating content for these platforms, want to know the average rating is Five Stars. Want to know the average viewership? ~100, to even get to the stage of generating money you need to create several hundred chapters, and essentially beat the system to even make a hundred dollars.
For most of them, they will quit writing after their first series doesn't pick up traction, most don't understand the formula and strategy, most dont have the time or money to try.
Average viewership for light novels reaching 30~ chapters is less than a few thousand meaning which might seem like a lot, but it's not. From there viewership gets lower and lower. It's all based on demand and the only thing people want to read is porn.
DRI (since absorbed into McGraw Hill) had EPS, an advanced economic/financial analysis scripting language, provided via timesharing (mainframes on the East Coast of the USA). I was a customer support programmer in San Francisco the day that they rolled out a powerful arrays feature on the testing mainframe (no clients, but lots of real work going on).
One could put anything as an element inside an array.
So I tried:
X=array(123, "abc")
Y=Array(X)
and it worked. You know where this is going, right?
i=loop from 1 to 1000
x(i+1) = array (xi)
It crashed the mainframe at i=67, if memory serves.
So far, so good, excusable as "clever programmer tests the limits". And then I ran it again.
Same result, plus, 2 minutes later, a call for me from my friend Kevin, who was a lead developer on EPS in DRI HQ:
"Chris, what the ^&^&^!@@ are you doing?"
I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see.
But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.
I'm old enough to have been a timesharing programmer (when a 32k->64k working memory increase seemed like limitless abundance).
The company I worked for offered very expensive timesharing by the hour. Clients used an "Englishy" interpreted language to do economic forecasts, and client staff often programmed their own procedures.
My boss came to me one day to request that I speed up something a client had developed themselves, because it had become too expensive for them to run, and they were ready to bolt.
I had no desire to understand what their code did, and so treated the code mostly like a blackbox, and my job as speeding things up while leaving the transformation of inputs to particular outputs intact.
I had enough experience to know what the low hanging fruit were and went after those in the code. A day's work or so, and we got a 50-90% speed-up, enough to satisfy the client. I still don't really know what the code did. But I enjoyed the effort.
I'll recommend Imago training [1] to any and all couples. It's reflective listening on steroids and was transformational for us.
The basic process starts w/reflective listening, then goes deeper to get at the underlying wound ("when you do that, it brings up all the times my parents..."), then to what might happen in a perfect world ("the toothpaste cap would magically fly back on the tube after 30 seconds of inactivity"), then to some concrete make-ups.
The other things we do that helps is to stick with the current argument (which I find difficult, sometimes) and to not go "meta" ("see, honey, there's a pattern here where you ...").
It's often worse than "meta" though, where a normally reasonable person will intentionally (though probably subconsciously) confuse and mislead when in the heat of an adrenalized fight or flight situation.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - that reads as a pretty fair question to me. I can't tell what makes the meta argument meta. But I can tell why one is going to lead to a much worse argument than the other:
Saying "when you do that, it brings up all the times my parents..." suggests that the problem lies in what the speaker is thinking and the speaker clearly knows it.
Compared to "see, honey, there's a pattern here where you ..." - the problem is still in what the speaker is thinking, but that sentence suggests the speaker doesn't understand that and is about to present their thinking as historical fact. If they phrased it "honey, what you just did made me think there's a pattern here where you..." would probably still be a bruising conversation but it will probably end in a much better place. The speaker has, based on a lot of arguments I've seen, almost certainly misunderstood the pattern they think they see.
My mother's favorite actor, singing a song whose German lyrics include "a ship isn't designed just to lie in the harbor; it needs to sail out to the open sea", and other more scandalous metaphors.
If I created a Zoom meeting with the trainees, and shared my screen and computer audio running my training video, would I have the same experience?
Phrased in terms of Zoom since I've become oh so familiar with it these past few months. I see the value, since it's probably easier to connect to than a Zoom meeting.
Screen sharing videos on zoom had never been a great experience. I think the difference is that everybody is streaming the YouTube video here individually.
The risk of reinfection is based in part on the amount of immunity in a population. Without a vaccine the way a population gains immunity is surviving an infection.
Unfortunately, even young healthy people are a significant risk of death so there are few good long term options.
The monthly database textfile is not that large, but it is unwieldy.
I'm a web consultant, but database backends are not yet a thing, at least not for us. Static webpages, all the way down.
So I use a script to parse the database into a series of text files and directories. E.g. JFK/index.html is a list of all the airports receiving flights from JFK, e.g. LAX, SFO, etc. And JFK/LAX.html is that month's results for all JFK to LAX flights. Etc.
As I recall, once I'd worked it out, it took 15 minutes to generate all those files on my Mac laptop, and then a little ftp action got the job done. Worked great, but someone did complain that we were polluting search results with so many pages for LAX, SFO, etc. etc. (SEO, sadly, was not really on our radar.)
That was replaced within a year by a php setup with a proper Oracle backend, and I had to explain to a DB admin what a weighted average was, but that's another story.