Link tags: developer

Get it shipped — building better relationships with Devs

This advice works both ways:

1. Collaboration
2. Communication
3. Respect

Design Engineer / Front-end Developer | Clearleft

Are you a web dev that’s into progressive enhancement, accessibility, design systems, and all that good stuff?

You should come and work with me at Clearleft.

WWC22 - Design Principles For The Web - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave in front of an enormous audience at the We Are Developers conference …using a backup slidedeck.

The cost of convenience — surma.dev

I believe that we haven’t figured out when and how to give a developer access to an abstraction or how to evaluate when an abstraction is worth using. Abstractions are usually designed for a set of specific use-cases. The problems, however, start when a developer wants to do something that the abstraction did not anticipate.

Smart thoughts from Surma on the design of libraries, frameworks, and other abstractions:

Abstractions that take work off of developers are valuable! Of course, they are. The problems only occur when a developer feels chained to the abstractions in a situation where they’d rather do something differently. The important part is to not force patterns onto them.

This really resonated with parts of my recent talk at CSS Day when I was talking about Sass and jQuery:

If you care about DX and the adoption of your abstraction, it is much more beneficial to let developers use as much of their existing skills as possible and introduce new concepts one at a time.

Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

The web historically moves in waves.

Libraries are created to push complex features in an easier way. Then the libraries themselves get complicated, often more so than the benefits they provide.

Eventually, (some of) the core features of those libraries make their way into the browser itself, but the libraries linger like water on the shore, slowly receding.

And before the sand has a chance to fully dry, a new set of libraries washes in to push the web even further.

Boring by default

More on battling entropy:

Ever needed to change “just a small thing” on an old page you build years ago? I recently had the pleasure and the simple task of changing some colors in CSS lead to a whole day of me wrangling with old deprecated Grunt tasks and trying to get the build task running.

The solution:

That’s why starting with HTML, CSS and JavaScript without the need to ever compile anything on your local machine is a good idea. Changing some colors on such a page would indeed only take minutes and not a whole day.

I like this mindset:

Be boring by default and enhance on the way.

Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

This post really highlights one of the biggest issues with the convoluted build tools used for “modern” web development. If you return to a project after any length of time, this is what awaits:

I find entropy staring me back in the face: library updates, breaking API changes, refactored mental models, and possible downright obsolescence. An incredible amount of effort will be required to make a simple change, test it, and get it live.

Always bet on HTML:

Take a moment and think about this super power: if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Edit a file, refresh the page, you’ve got a feedback cycle. As soon as you introduce tooling, as soon as you introduce an abstraction not native to the browser, you may have to invent the universe for a feedback cycle.

Maintainability matters—if not for you, then for future you.

The more I author code as it will be run by the browser the easier it will be to maintain that code over time, despite its perceived inferior developer ergonomics (remember, developer experience encompasses both the present and the future, i.e. “how simple are the ergonomics to build this now and maintain it into the future?) I don’t mind typing some extra characters now if it means I don’t have to learn/relearn, setup, configure, integrate, update, maintain, and inevitably troubleshoot a build tool or framework later.

Why you should hire a frontend developer - Technology in government

This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.

That’s front end, not full stack.

CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications - MadeByMike

Mike sees the church of JS-first ignoring the lessons to be learned from the years of experience accumulated by CSS practitioners.

As the responsibilities of front-end developers have become more broad, some might consider the conventions outlined here to be not worth following. I’ve seen teams spend weeks planning the right combination of framework, build tools, workflows and patterns only to give zero consideration to the way they architect UI components. It’s often considered the last step in the process and not worthy of the same level of consideration.

It’s important! I’ve seen well-planned project fail or go well over budget because the UI architecture was poorly planned and became un-maintainable as the project grew.

Visitors, Developers, or Machines

Garrett’s observation is spot-on here:

I’ve been trying to understand the appeal of these frameworks by giving them an objective chance. I’ve expanded my knowledge of JavaScript and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have their places, but the only explanation I can come up with is that developers are taking a similar approach as Ruby and focusing on developer convenience and productivity. Only, instead of Ruby’s performance being tied to the CPU level, JavaScript frameworks push the performance burden to the client.

In both cases, the tradeoff happens in the name of developer happiness and productivity, but the strategies have entirely different consequences. With Ruby, the CPU is still (mostly) the responsibility of the development team, and it can be upgraded. With JavaScript, the page weight becomes an externality pushed onto visitors.

What Makes a Mid-Level Developer? | Amber’s Website

I love the way that Amber is documenting her journey—I think this is so useful for others making the progression from junior to mid-level developer.

Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.

Chris broke both his arms just to avoid speaking at the JAMstack conference in London. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Anyway, to make up for not being there, he made a website of his talk. It’s good stuff, tackling the split.

It’s cool to see the tech around our job evolve to the point that we can reach our arms around the whole thing. It’s worthy of some concern when we feel like complication of web technology feels like it’s raising the barrier to entry

7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

This is a wonderfully written post packed with hard-won wisdom.

This are the myths that Monica dispelled for herself:

1. I’m a senior developer
2. Everyone writes tests
3. We’re so far behind everyone else (AKA “tech FOMO”)
4. Code quality matters most
5. Everything must be documented!!!!
6. Technical debt is bad
7. Seniority means being the best at programming

Defining Productivity — Jeremy Wagner

We have a tendency in our line of work to assume that what benefits us as developers translates to a benefit for those who use what we make. This is an unsafe assumption.

I’m a Web Designer - Andy Bell

Something that I am increasingly uncomfortable with is our industry’s obsession with job titles. I understand that the landscape has gotten a lot more complex than when I started out in 2009, but I do think the sheer volume and variation in titles isn’t overly helpful in communicating what people actually do.

I share Andy’s concern. I kinda wish that the title for this open job role at Clearleft could’ve just said “Person”.

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Why do people decide to use frameworks?

Some sensible answers to this question here…

…of which, exactly zero mention end users.

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience · An A List Apart Article

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.

Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.

Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.

This is a great article about evaluating technology.

The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch | Infrequently Noted

JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.

Damn, that’s a fine opening! And the rest of this post by Alex is pretty darn great too. He’s absolutely right in calling out the fetishisation of developer experience at the expense of user needs:

The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.

I have a feeling that this will be a very bitter pill for many developers to swallow:

If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias towards richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority. If you believe the web’s future to be at risk due to the unusability of most web experiences for most users, then discussion of developer comfort that isn’t tied to demonstrable gains for marginalized users is at best misguided.

Oh,captain, my captain!

Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk.

“Designer + Developer Workflow,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.