CSS for Developers
June 3, 2015
The more that I meet and build relationships with other Front-End Developers I'm starting to see a trend of really talented software developers moving towards Front-End development and trying as hard as they can to stay away from CSS.
Have you ever or do you currently think this...
"CSS is a necessary evil that is bloated, confusing, brittle, and hard to maintain." --Back-End Brian (see personas below)
Novice Notion
For a minute, think about a Back-End developer that is transitioning to Front-End work...
JavaScript typically isn't too hard for them to grasp once they get past the dynamic and functional nature of the language.
HTML is easy enough for them to learn and typically they don't run into issues with markup as they build websites or webapps.
CSS seemed simple enough when going through a quick tutorial, but once they started trying to style something according to design it quickly become frustrating and overwhelming.
Personas
It's a challenge to make a talk that provides values for a diverse experienced audience. So, I decided to try something new. I created 3 main personas (based on Random User Generator) and referenced them throughout the talk as the material progresses.
Tips, Techniques, and Tools
Thankfully with a some basic foundational concepts, modern techniques, and tooling we can raise the bar of our CSS understanding, organization, and maintainability.
- Box Model
- Specificity
- Position
- Cascading
- Sizing
- Alignment
- Sass & Sass Docs
- Atomic Design
- BEM
- Linting
Slides
You can find the slides from the presentation online at elijahmanor.com/talks/css-for-devs/
Note: This slide deck is fairly new. I have plans to iterate on some of the later modules in the talk. Stay tuned :)
Podcast
I was intervied on the .NET Rocks podcast last week by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. The episode is now online #1147: CSS for Developers with Elijah Manor.
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