For the first time ever here on CSS-Tricks, we’re going to do an end-of-year series of posts. Like an Advent calendar riff, only look at us, we’re beating the Advent calendar rush! We’ll be publishing several articles a day from a variety of web developers we look up to, where they were all given the same prompt:
What about building websites has you interested this year?
We’re aiming for a bit of self-reflection and real honesty. As in, not what you think you should care about or hot takes on current trends, but something that has quite literally got you thinking. Our hope is that all put together, the series paints an interesting picture of where we are and where we’re going in the web development industry.
We didn’t directly ask people for their future predictions. Instead, we will perhaps get a glimpse of the future through seeing what is commanding the attention of developers today. I wanted to mention that because this series takes some inspiration from the one NeimanLabs runs each year (e.g. 2019, 2018, 2017…) which directly asks for people’s predictions about journalism. Maybe we’ll try that one year!
Automattic has a been a wonderful partner to us for a while now, and so I’m using this series as another way to thank them for that. Automattic are the makers of WordPress.com and big contributors to WordPress itself, which is what this site runs on. They also make premium plugins like WooCommerce and Jetpack, which we also use.
Stay tuned for all the wonderful thoughts we’ll be publishing this week (hey, I even hear RSS is still cool) or bookmark the homepage for the series.
I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about the best ways to bring the value brick-and-mortar businesses used to offer to e-commerce. A friendly greeting, a personalized shopping experience, encouraging client availability for phone calls from their customers, and carefully crafted e-commerce transaction and newsletter emails that use data points within sentences that make it really seem like a person wrote to them. A lot more, but those are the few at the top of the mind at the moment.
Hey, do you have a link to the site where I can leave feedback, maybe I missed it in the article?
Following on from the article, our team has really enjoyed moving into the frontend space of SPA’s and progressive web apps. We have been using Vue mainly and dabbling a bit with React and it has been really fun and a movement forward in terms of how we build websites.
Another thing that has been really interesting is getting into the Continuous Integration space and using Docker locally for development as well as for deployment which has improved our turn around times as well as allowing us to start putting in Unit Tests before sites go into a production environment!
The web development space is a great space to be in right now, so many new and awesome tools to work with.
Love to check out some of the new articles that are posted on CSS-tricks as well which pushes us to try out new technology or new features in programming languages/frameworks.
It’s the wrong question. A better question would be:
How are you going to deliver better experiences for the products you built?
Technology is not a solution. It’s not an ends. It’s a means. Yet we keep obsessing about the means, and that keeps us from soliving for the ends.
Goals matters. What we focus on matters.