CSS for Developers
03 Jun 2015Wait, what!?! CSS for Developers? Arenโt developers supposed to know CSS? Yes, the title of this blog post and associated talk may seem odd at first, but I feel it reaches out to several audiences that need itโฆ and one of those used to be me.
The more that I meet and build relationships with other Front-End Developers Iโm 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 thisโฆ
โCSS is a necessary evil that is bloated, confusing, brittle, and hard to maintain.โ โBack-End Brian (see personas below)
Novice Notion
For a minute, think about a Back-End developer that is transitioning to Front-End workโฆ
JavaScript typically isnโt 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 donโt 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
Itโs 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.