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Things I wish I’d known about CSS

cssfordesigners.com

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Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#331

Post by bobbyz »

nwallin wrote: post #210
k__ wrote: post #126

It always helped me to do an absolute basic concepts course on a new technology I learn. Like, sure I can play around in Photoshop or Eclipse or CSS or JavaScript and find most things. But a good 101 course is worth so much saved time. Most of the stuff in that article was mentioned in a CSS box model course I did 10 years ago. People were always baffled how I learned all this. Well, I read the docs! They always assu…

> I always have the feeling people just cobble around for too long and should instead take at least a few days for a more structured learning approach. There are two kinds of documentation: there's a list of all the individual things you can do, and there's a "The fundamental abstraction is this ". The second is rare, and rarely done correctly, and much more important. A lot of people assume that X is like Y, but wit…

If someone needs to read documentation for a few days in order to figure out which end of the sword to hold, perhaps the sword was just poorly designed and unintuitive.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#332

Post by bobbyz »

CSS was designed to make sense in a context that is no longer relatable, same with Git. This will never, ever happen if you'd designed your system to mimic nature (unless global warming fundamentally changes it).

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#333

Post by perl4ever »

ChrisRR wrote: post #88
runawaybottle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably more to the story here. If you’re only at about 50k, you’re making $24 an hour. There’s even cheaper labor than you. It’s going to be a disgusting race to the bottom if we start paying everyone 20, 18, 15 ... dollars an hour. At this point in my life you would have to pay me around six figures for me to do CSS seriously on a daily basis (and it’s likely I’ll still burn out and leave). The cross brow…

If you think CSS is tedious, then you've never dealt with medical device regulations. cross browser testing will seem like an absolute breeze. If a UK employer were paying £90k for CSS, absolutely everybody and their dog would be applying for a job that pays double a typical dev salary. I think we've already experienced the race to the bottom and come out the other side, with $24 being fairly average for the world an…

There's a whole world outside SF in the US where people do make ~$24/hr. It is well above the median salary in the US. Things may be closer to equilibrium than a lot of people think. I used to work for an outsourcing company that was roughly 50-50 people in the US and in India, and there was never any indication that the US people would be fired en masse, probably because they were somewhat more productive, and somewhat higher paid, and the differences weren't huge.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#334

Post by sgt-serverless »

k__ wrote: post #126

It always helped me to do an absolute basic concepts course on a new technology I learn. Like, sure I can play around in Photoshop or Eclipse or CSS or JavaScript and find most things. But a good 101 course is worth so much saved time. Most of the stuff in that article was mentioned in a CSS box model course I did 10 years ago. People were always baffled how I learned all this. Well, I read the docs! They always assu…

> It always helped me to do an absolute basic concepts course on a new technology I learn.

Totally agree. I remember reading a CSS book on kindle in Aruba many years back. I find I really need to deep dive into something to understand it. Because at that point, I was like, I can code in everything, I really need to understand what the heck this CSS is doing. Thank goodness for flex box now, saves so much manually work. I code a lot in Vue with Vuetify, so thisthat is magical.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#335

Post by account42 »

bobbyz wrote: post #331
nwallin wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always have the feeling people just cobble around for too long and should instead take at least a few days for a more structured learning approach. There are two kinds of documentation: there's a list of all the individual things you can do, and there's a "The fundamental abstraction is this ". The second is rare, and rarely done correctly, and much more important. A lot of people assume that X is like Y, but wit…

If someone needs to read documentation for a few days in order to figure out which end of the sword to hold, perhaps the sword was just poorly designed and unintuitive.

So you want a dull sword with handles on both ends just so that nobody can possibly cut themselves? Professional tools are meant to be efficient for those trained in using them and if that means they are slightly harder to learn that's OK.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#336

Post by abhishekjha »

afarrell wrote: post #308
commandlinefan wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a "The fundamental abstraction is this" In most cases, I'd settle for "what problem this is trying to solve" (although this is obvious for CSS, it isn't nearly as obvious for things like React and Vue).

The problem here is that really understanding "what problem this is trying to solve" often requires a passing familiarity with cognitive science. How many people here could explain the link between Working Memory and React.js?

New to JS world. Would love to know a brief explanation.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#337

Post by thirdsun »

epicureanideal wrote: post #244
tr1coder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inexcusable fact here is that he said that he didn't know how it works. A font-end developer not knowing grid is not worth 6 figures.

I disagree, as both an engineer and a manager. CSS grid is only recently becoming a reasonable tool to use in practice. I don't think any of the top 1% of front end engineers I know would be able to use CSS grid without looking at the documentation. Based on experience, the kind of person who would be able to use it from memory either 1) is very skilled AND had a reason to use it recently, or 2) someone of medium ski…

> I don't think any of the top 1% of front end engineers I know would be able to use CSS grid without looking at the documentation.

You probably don't mean it that way, but not having to use the documentation surely isn't a requirement for competency. I resort to the docs all the time, even with topics I'm quite famialiar and experienced with.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#338

Post by bigmanwalter »

epicureanideal wrote: post #239
bigmanwalter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS Grid has only been widely supported for a couple years now. Not so hard to believe a frontend dev was still using bootstrap grid.

I agree. It's fairly common for experienced front end devs who have been bitten by browser incompatibilities in the past to wait several years to adopt the latest CSS techniques. The "old techniques" often work very well. Most likely if you had asked me "why flexbox and not CSS grid" I would have said "because flexbox is able to perfectly well support this use case, and I'd rather not introduce a dependency on a less…

I used to work like that but CSS Grid is actually amazing. Highly recommended.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#339

Post by noByte »

miiiiiike wrote: post #77
nefitty wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be one of the most helpful book recommendations I’ve ever read.

Thanks. If you'd like some more book and video suggestions I sent this to a friend back when she was looking to get into front-end development a few months ago: Here are some book and video links (with Amazon affiliate tags snuck in). I've read all of these books cover-to-cover save for the RxJS one. They approach front-end as a set of technologies that should be understood and mastered rather than the "CsS hAckS to…

Thanks for sharing this list. If you happen to have any recommendations for pure JavaScript, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, I'll probably take a look at the TypeScript recommendations and work my way through the material.

Re: Things I wish I’d known about CSS

#340

Post by davegauer »

mslm wrote: post #173
theelous3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobbler here, currently cobbling a frontend (am a backend dev by trade). The issue for me is the format these courses and resources take. CSS is the most jam packed with non-intuitive technology I've met. How many dozens of pages or segments of video would I have to go through in a course to learn what the author in OP summarised in two or three sentences? Any time I've considered the structured approach for somethin…

I had the same perspective on these frontend technologies as a backend/ops guy, and it all finally clicked when it came to me that I just couldn't find a justification for why CSS was the way it was. This was solved trivially by just reading the history of CSS. It was shocking to finally have made clear all of the quirks and weird aspects of CSS that always made it difficult for me to connect the dots and feel myself…

This is so true. Though I'd been writing CSS long enough to remember Netscape 4.0 quirks, it wasn't until I learned some troff a couple years back that I had my moment of CSS enlightenment. The fundamental features are the same! CSS (and HTML) were (originally) made for pages of technical/academic writing, not creating user interfaces.
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