The question is in the title. The voting widget is the sidebar on larger screens and down there somewhere on smaller screens.
By “touch”, I mean:
- Actually author and edit it.
- Or, are an active consumer of it. You/they write HTML and use the CSS available thus have a vested interest in the actual CSS, not just the outcome.
This is potentially a different number than the number of people in your organization, on your project, or even on your front end team. There is probably some surprisingly large organizations where the answer is 1 or 2. And probably some smaller organizations where lots of people are in and out of the CSS.
As all of our simple one-off polls, we won’t get any cross-reference. But, we’ll get a sense of the situation for a wide swath of front end developers. I’m very curious to see the results here. I honestly can’t guess how the curve is going to look.
If you work on lots of projects, pick one. Pick the biggest or the one you spend the most time on or care the most about.
Being a lone freelancer, I’ll abstain from the vote. I am very curious as to the outcome. Hopefully some of the comments will be insightful as well!
This will be good, poor 26+ people… We had a shitshow with our css so we implemented “scss-lint” and boom, its been plain sailing till now. Just make sure you throw an error when Grunt compiles/builds the project or they can push un-linted css upstream
You left off “Way too many”.
We have a dev team of about 12 people, with several outside the team touching code as well. Only four of us should be writing css. We’ve tried locking it down by restricting permission to the css directory – but that resulted in hundreds of rogue css files, in -page css defs and a boatload of inline code.
We’re trying valiantly to clean it all up right now since we need to do a quick rebrand of the site.
With the redesign we’re using the approach of using a framework and making added styles as atomic and easy to remember as possible to try to avoid the problem.
The site is very large and changes daily. Short of adding a scanner to look for and style=”” in the deployment cycle, I really don’t know how we can keep things clean.
Suggestions are appreciated.
Set a header and use a CDN
–
default-src *–
style-src {CDN URL}– Limit access to the CDN
This will mean that any inline style, as well as same-domain CSS will not work.
You could skip the CDN and use
style-src 'self'to just get rid of inline styles.I work in enterprise on a large internal project. 15 developers, out of that we’ve got 2 people actively touching our CSS. Its a Rails project and we use a standalone gem to load all of our Sass.
I’m the sole web developer in a team of about ten software engineers. If it’s front-end, it’s all me. I don’t think anyone else here even knows CSS.
Being the only developer at Smashing Magazine, it’s kind of obvious how many people touch our CSS. =D
Sorry, can’t answer this… we don’t have a “main” project per se, we dip in and out of lots. Typically about 3-5, but we often pick up disasters from other people. This morning, for example, I was hip deep in a project and the previous people had mostly (nicely) commented their CSS. There were 10 people there in addition to whoever wrote the original. 9 of them aren’t anything to do with our organisation. But today it was just me and the person checking it over.
We have a small team (5 developers) who all dabble with the code base. We have switched to using pre-made templates, and only over-riding the pre-built CSS with minor tweaks of our own. These are as specific as needed for each developer’s sub-projects to make sure they don’t override anyone else’s work.
I think all the people answering “one” are freelancers. We’re the only ones with time to read articles like this on the internet. :)
Lol no. I used to read while I was with a company too. And I was the only one that wrote CSS in the last project because none of ’em understood Sass and all that they were left with was my minified CSS from compass. Even if they wanted to mess with the CSS, they couldn’t
FWIW, I answered “one” and I’m not a freelancer…
I answered one, and I am not a freelancer. I am the whole of our web development and design department. We are a very small company, so I wear a lot of hats. Only one other person at our company would even understand what he was looking at if they opened the css files.
My lunch breaks are a time I’ve set aside to catch up and read articles. It’s much nicer than working through lunch.
This was tricky to answer for me. We have a small dev team (7 all told, but not all touch CSS), but product and marketing all ‘consume’ the CSS with the second definition in order to make CMS based pages using existing CSS classes so I had to pick 11-25.
When a project is in active development here, only one person is working on the CSS. Once a project is launched we aren’t as picky and 3-4 different people may work on it.
I’m developing alone but many teams (7-10 persons) uses my CSS.
I would be interested to know how this correlates to using Git. Everybody, designers included, should use Git, according to the numerous tweets. However, I never found one person willing to explain a good Git workflow for a small team (as it involves more than just using basic Git commands). On the other hand, I can’t see how two or more designers, frontend developers,… could work on the same CSS without version control of some sort.
We have about 20 developers at my office, and pretty much everyone is expected to write CSS when a project demands it, resulting in at least half the devs (somewhere between 11 and 20) touching our CSS on a semi-regular basis. We’ve got strict coding standards, so the quality of the new code we write is not too bad (I’d like to think…)
ive A small team (3 dev)
but only 2 dev touches our css_
Where I work it’s pretty confusing. We have about 2000 WordPress based customers (SoleTraders, builders etc), there’s hundreds on legacy customers meaning there’s been about 10 interns on them from varying degrees of skill – so a hella a lot of inline styling, impropper nesting and then just awful code which makes changing any aspect very hard and under time restraints, cleaning code is even harder. We have 4 in hour devs (inc me), but only 2 the often touch the CSS – my other dev is questionable on his skill too. It’s not the greatest work..
Any kind of repository (Git, Mercurial or the other one..) will make your life way easier. I am part of a team of 8 people. Repositories are the only way in which we can work together. As I said, since we started using it… much better.
Ahh, interesting to see 1500 (53% as of this minute) people are in my boat of being the only ones who touch CSS. On my team, that goes for Javascript too. Only two other people on my team have (minor) HTML skills (they use the <
font> tag a lot, sadface).Chris, It seems like a lot of front-end discussion out there (and most of this site) is geared towards helping teams manage unwieldy code bases, and less discussion is targeted toward the lone rangers out there. This leaves many confused about the best tactics to managing CSS & Javascript and which tools are most appropriate to invest time in learning. Personally, I find myself doing a lot of mental filtering of all the hottest trends trying to find content relevant to a 1-man coding operation, and I know I’d certainly appreciate more blog posts focused on helping those in our not-so-unique situation.
I love hearing everyone’s workflows.
My projects usually have 2-3 front-end devs.
We use Git + Gulp with Sass and linting. We create a Sass partial for each page. Sometimes we will break down page sections into partials if it is a complicated page. Git with Sass partials help avoid merge conflicts for the most part. This workflow works well for us!
26+ would be a lot of fun…. NOT!