For the first time in recent memory, I spent the entire day buried up to my ears in HTML, CSS and Javascript, nerding out over a re-build of the company website. I sat down when I arrived in the office, and apart from getting up once or twice to make coffee I pretty much blocked the entire world out for the best part of 8 hours.
Every now and again somebody would stop by and look over my shoulderusually to glaze over as I explained “you have to imagine this having lots of content here, a nice graphic here, oh and don’t look at that bit yetthat will have some nice typographical styling”.
Before I knew it the entire day had vanished, and another day was being found in the schedule for me to continue the magic act.
I like webdesign. It’s very similar to software development, but easier to explain to the laymanbecause the code is interpreted you can make changes while somebody watches, and show them immediate results. The semantic nature of HTML and CSS is easy to explain. It’s probably best that we don’t even begin to talk about Javascript and jQueryEven among my peerssome of whom are brilliant programmersI am regarded at the moment as “Mr Javascript”, or “Mr jQuery”. I say “at the moment” on purposebecause that’s the nature of software development while many people bow down in awe when faced with a skilled developer, the truth is that we don’t know anything like as much as you might think. Sure, we know the stuff we have been doing recently, but if you asked us about the intricacies of some piece of code we wrote as recently as a month ago, we would be in trouble. Our universal trick is having half an idea, and running with it.
Throughout my career I’ve crossed paths with a couple of really exceptional developers. They tend to rely on figuring out how to do things on the fly, rather than look something up. I can still remember one particular encounter when I asked somebody if they had a code snippet to do something rare, and they squinted for a few seconds, and then started reciting raw code at me.
Anyway enough of the nerd fest. I’m writing this while waiting for the desktop machine to trawl through our archive of photosthumbnailing them to (hopefully) make finding things a little easier.
I promise to have some “real life” to write about soon.