Front End Development
It’s a way of life
Front End Development is a key role in the war on creativity. You can easily do without a designer now and just colour in your latest Bootplate Boilerstrap.
But it’s hard.
Sometimes it requires a cup of coffee. Not an instant cup of coffee. Like Vodka, coffee for front end development is best served triple filtered, with ice if you’re really at the forefront of your craft.
Fundamentally Front End Development is a way of life. You have to spend your life not enjoying family and friends but picking holes at others code. Making sure you’re using the latest Gah or Grr task manager to impress your ‘friends’.
You can’t use CSS anymore, no way. You shouldn’t even look at it now you’re agonizing over your variable names. Life’s too short to worry about how the CSS looks now you’ve worked out how to ‘nest’ things and make awesome loops that ‘just work’.
Obviously you don’t use HTML5, you use HTML 5.1. A work in progress but you’re at the cutting edge, like a pirate from the wild west days.
Everyone’s got super high speed internet right? What’s an Opera mini anyhow? You’ve just gotta make sure those images look fab on a retina display. That’s what matters. High resolution images will fit down the intertubes so smoothly, if you wait and make sure you don’t tick ‘progressive’ on those jpeg files, smooth doesn’t mean ‘bit by bit’.
The web is 99% typography, so make sure that other 1% is at least a megabyte of unoptimised pngs.
Make sure those fonts load, eventually. Users are really excited about a blank page. The intrigue, the excitement, the suspense. By the time your fonts have finally loaded they will get even more excited as they’ve forgotten why they were on the page. A bonus.
Stop using plain HTML, get JavaScript to do this for you. Everyone has it now, it’s even part of the constitution in the US and Boris Johnson’s adding it to his Queens speech. A JavaScript frameplate makes it easier and simpler for you. A bonus.
Ultimately that’s the main thing. Front End Development is a way of life to make your life simpler. So you can look at the hippest bicycle, listen to obscure music, drink coffee made from beetle crap and tweet about privacy all day long.
So go forth, embrace all these new technologies that make your life better. Browsers will catch up, users will still engage and your beard will look better for it.
