Introducing the Made by Many professional development programme – Made by Many

The Great Divide | CSS-Tricks

An excellent thorough analysis by Chris of the growing divide between front-end developers and …er, other front-end developers?

The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.

On one side, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are heavily revolved around JavaScript.

On the other, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are focused on other areas of the front end, like HTML, CSS, design, interaction, patterns, accessibility, etc.

Stop Learning Frameworks – Lifehacks for Developers by Eduards Sizovs

It’s a terribly clickbaity (and negatively phrased) title, but if you turn it around, there’s some good advcie in here for deciding where to focus when it comes to dev technology:

• Programming languages are different, but design smells are alike.
• Frameworks are different, but the same design patterns shine through.
• Developers are different, but rules of dealing with people are uniform.

5 things CSS developers wish they knew before they started | CSS-Tricks

1. Don’t underestimate CSS
2. Share and participate
3. Pick the right tools
4. Get to know the browser
5. Learn to write maintainable CSS

Confidence and Overwhelm

Following on from her great conversation with Jen on The Web Ahead podcast, Rachel outlines a strategy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of tools, frameworks, libraries, and techniques inundating front-end developers every day:

Learn your core skills well. Understand HTML and CSS, be able to build a layout without leaning on a framework. Get a solid understanding of how a website actually gets from the server to a browser, an understanding of security and accessibility. These are the basics, the constants. These things change slowly. These things sit underneath all the complexity and the tooling, the CMSs and the noise of thousands of people all trying to make their mark on this industry.

She also makes this important point:

As you are doing this don’t forget to share what you know.

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

• Don’t wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
• Every tool will eventually fade.
• Flexibility is a valuable skill
• Changing tools does not mean starting over.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.