I share my own thoughts on how you might go about educating someone you just built a site for. But it turns out I had a lot of fun putting together a ton of other people's thoughts as well. I tweeted about it and got a flood of responses, so this article is an amalgamation of all that.
The path to becoming a front-end developer, as looked back upon by anyone who self-identifies that way, is likely a very windy one full of thorn bushes and band websites. Still, documenting a path, even if it's straighter and far cleaner than reality, is an interesting exercise and might just be valuable. Three different writer/developers have taken a crack at it this year and their results have been extraordinarily popular. Let's take a look.
Keith J. Grant:
I want to look at three key characteristics of CSS that set it apart from conventional programming languages: it’s resilient; it’s declarative; and it’s contextual. Understanding these aspects of the language, I think, is key to becoming proficient in CSS.
font-size. Increase it, and the container will also grow in height without you having to tell it to.And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.
Easy to learn, a lifetime to master, as they say.
Brad Frost's "Just" article from a few years ago has struck a fresh nerve with folks. It's a simple word that can slip out easily, that might be invoked to keep text casual-feeling, but the result can be damaging. Brad:
The amount of available knowledge in our field (or any field really) is growing larger, more complex, and more segmented all the time. That everyone has downloaded the same fundamental knowledge on any topic is becoming less and less probable. Because of this, we have to be careful not to make too many assumptions in our documentation, blog posts, tutorials, wikis, and communications.
Imagine yourself explaining a particular task to an earlier version of yourself. Once upon a time, you didn’t know what you know now. Provide context. The beauty of hypertext is that we’re able to quickly add much-needed context helpful for n00bs but easy enough for those already in-the-know to scan over. And making documentation more human-readable benefits everyone.
Ethan Marcotte takes this one step further:
I’ve noticed a rhetorical trope in our industry. It’s not, like, widespread, but I see it in enough blog entries and conference talks that I think it’s a pretty common pattern: namely, the author’s sharing some advice with the reader and, if the reader’s boss or stakeholders won’t support a given course of action, suggests the reader “just do the thing anyway.”
I think this is a bad, harmful trope. And I also think we should avoid using it.
I was talking with a pal the other day and moaning about flexbox for the millionth time because I had momentarily forgotten the difference between the justify-content and align-items properties.
"How do I center an element horizontally with flex again?” I wondered. Well, that was when she gave me what I think is the best shorthand way of remembering how the two work together.
Howdy. I'm taking this week's "Sponsored Post" to give a shout out to some apps, courses, and services that I personally like. These things also have affiliate programs, meaning if you buy the thing, we earn a portion of that sale, which supports this site. That money goes to pay people to write the things we publish. That said, everything on this list is something that I'm happy going on the record endorsing.
Raise your hand if this sounds like you:
You’ve been in the tech industry for a number of years, you know HTML and CSS inside-and-out, and you make a good living. But, you have a little voice in the back of your head that keeps whispering, "It’s time for something new, for the next step in your career. You need to learn programming."
Yep, same here.
Jose Aguinaga pinched a community nerve:
The JavaScript community is insane if it thinks anyone can keep up with this.
I heard a lot of Hilarious! So true! reactions. I heard a lot of Nope. This isn't what it's like. reactions, sprinkled with You don't have to use/start with every tool. and Both of these people (in this fake conversation) are kinda jerks.
Some Baby Bear reactions include Tim Kadlec and Addy Osmani. Sacha Greif wrote to me to point out that the results of his big survey indicate most JavaScript devs are pretty happy with the language and ecosystem.
Missed title opportunity: "How it feels to read 'How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016'"