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What are your biggest challenges as a front-end web developer?

9 April, 2015 by Jakob

Becoming a web developer is challenging. Either you’re self-taught or a degree holder both have to endure struggles on reading and understanding theories to apply them. Series of continuous cycles of failure to go through before having a successful page that would satisfy clients.

But the challenges does not stop there. Even if you are the best front-end web developer you think you are, challenges, struggles are still out there. To name some of them, I’ve gathered some answers given by professional web developers around the world.

Here are the following:

  • Coding Javascript in a robust way. Backend software is evolved and it’s relatively easy to create good, maintainable code there, using MVC and mature CMS’s. With Javascript, I wouldn’t say that it’s as easy, since applications haven’t been as Javascript-intense as they are now for more than half a decade. You need to put more effort into making sure all Javascript is working in all browsers and that new code is written and placed in a maintainable way.
  • Keeping a good balance between long term and short term design desitions. Too short, and the code will break apart upon your next change. Too long, your team wont be agile enough.
  • Communicate key design concepts, best practices and library usage throughout the team. With too little freedom, people will get bored and do a bad job. With too much freedom people will create clusters of good code that doesn’t work well together. I don’t want a cathedral nor a bazaar.
  • Balancing automated testing. Test too much, you spend time building tests. Test too little, stuff will break in production.
  • Balancing iteration time between major framework upgrades.
  • Getting people to understand MVC, for all the obvious reasons.
  • Communicating SEO concepts, both to editors and developers.
  • Keeping sites easy to maintain for editors. If the site isn’t easy to maintain for editors, it really doesn’t matter how good your code is. A site needs to be easy and fun to update and keep current.
  • Making sure things look the same across all versions of Internet Explorer as they look in other browsers.
  • Making sure every UI element (button, navigation, link) work as intended whether or not the user has JavaScript or cookies disabled (technology-independant development).
  • Should I choose to use the current web browser standards and technologies (think HTML5 and CSS3), providing negative user experience in older browsers, that haven’t adopted this technology yet, or use images and other “tricky” methods to achieve the same results, sacrificing page loading time and modern standards standards.
  • HTML tables
  • Debugging JavaScript code (for performance or errors, especially if it’s minified)
  • Managing client expectations.
  • Educating the client.
  • Preventing scope creep.
  • Client insecurities/fears.

To know more about current challenges faced by different web developers you can join their conversation at Quora: “What are your biggest challenges as a front-end web developer?”

If you have somethings you want to add on, feel free to comment or send me an email of your biggest challenges as a front-end web develop. Thanks.

Filed Under: Web Development

Top skills every web developer should have

8 April, 2015 by Jakob

As a web developer, besides writing HTML code, there is much more to do before the site can go live. You may consider about user experience, device compatibility, security etc. To be a good web developer, you should acquire some essential skills for web development.

It is not enough nowadays to rely on the basics. Web development had been rampant and many people are into it. To be able to compete with others you must consider having the following essential skills:

1. Programming Competency
Web developers must be able to code. This is supposed to sound obvious. An effective web developer must be able to write syntactically valid HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript.

2. Adaptability
The technology is not constant but keeps on changing, so a web developer can’t have the luxury to sit back and relax. They need to learn and move along with the change. It’s impossible to know where web development will go in 5 years, but those who follow standards bodies or at least read tech blogs have a much better understanding of upcoming changes and growing trends. It’s not enough to follow the industry. Web developers must also understand their users and how they use the product.

3. Security
Every web developer must understand how malicious people can use their product to attack the site or other even other users. If the web developer has skill #1, they should be familiar with the security concerns of the industry and common defenses.  The security of a website is a major concern which should be answered and the developer should be capable enough to provide a capable and secured website.

4. Accessibility
Developers must be able to write code that is flexible enough to be used in different ways. Search engines and screen readers for the blind are two examples of machines interpreting your code. Sites that are heavy with Flash or foreground images for UI tend to struggle here. Accessibility at its core is really about usability. Web developers must know about any obstacles between the user and the product to better design it. Know your user, set limits to what you will and will not support, implement a cross-compatible solution, and test thoroughly.

5. Testing
All web developers must be able to test their code in multiple browsers. It’s easy to test for our own personal browser of choice and ignore the rest, but the web is about diversity and the browser landscape is very diverse. A website continuously need updates and a developer should ensure that the user doesn’t get hampered when one is making updates. It should be a smooth process. Occurrences of errors are inevitable on any website and one should make sure that unfriendly errors are not visible to the users.

6. Creativity
This may sound unusual but creativity is the back bone for any art. Web developing is an art and an artist can only produce a beautiful website. The codes are the colors and a web developer like a true artist should know how to play with codes. The end result should be exceptional enough so that it makes you different from the crowd.

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: Skills

Becoming a great web developer

6 April, 2015 by Jakob

Becoming great in almost all aspect in life is not easy. It requires time and effort. It is not something you can have in 24 hours, it needs devotion and commitment.

Much like in web developing. Nowadays, people are into web developing and the market becomes very saturated because there are many of those out there.

A web developer can be one of your most critical hires. After all, that’s the person who will create the online face of your company and enable you to interact virtually with your customers.

So, it’s especially important that you hire the right talent the first time out. Otherwise, you risk hurting your business, as well as wasting time and money seeking a replacement.

To know how to become one of the best web developer, you need to consider the following:

Devops
Devops flies in the face of two traditional silos: production, which keeps things running, and development, which makes new stuff. The silos result in two camps with little sympathy for each other. Devops is a huge field in itself, encompassing continuous deployment and lots of automation. This is a sweeping summary, but the key thing developers need to understand is the stack they’re running on.

Know how to fix it.
The ability to fix apps requires excellent problem solving skills, but not just debugging code. Learn to debug and use other options and methods as well.

Drawing and writing
Drawing is the most direct way of communicating what stuff will be like. Developers must be able to draw their ideas. Developers must be able to prototype on paper, printing screenshots and scribble on them just to communicate their intention.

Understand the medium on what the internet says
Googling for ‘essential web development skills’ brings up what you’d expect. Framework knowledge, x-browser, CSS and JS. They list frameworks you should know, platforms you must be writing for and new trends you should be keeping an eye on. A developer can understand every detail of the system, tell you every feature of an API and a new CSS technology but still produce something unusable.

Developers, like everyone, need to understand their medium – but they must also understand the audience, be that the users, the team or other developers. They need to understand how their medium fits into the world (in other words, the production environment) and what effect it has (how people use it).

Coding don’t cut it anymore
We’re in a world where coding is becoming less impressive. Everyone builds sites, some of them code but you don’t have to. It’s no longer just the nerdy who can create sites, apps and features. Since the web came along and people could teach themselves there have been self-taught developers. But even the graduates are under threat.

Developers need to be better in two ways: breadth and depth. They need to understand the breadth of human interactions in their team and with the things they build. They need to understand the depth of the system they’re working with, down to the O/S.

Filed Under: Web Development

Free online web development courses

5 April, 2015 by Jakob

Web design can be daunting. Just the sheer amount of new techniques and acronyms appearing every day can make it seem scary and confusing, even if you’re a professional web designer, let alone a beginner. But don’t worry – help is at hand in the form of easy-to-understand web design training resources on the web.

There are many approaches to web design training – some paid, some free; some interactive, some not; some based on text, others on video.

Below are some of the best online web development course you can find free online:

1. Codecademy

web design training

Codecademy describes itself as the ‘easiest way to learn how to code’ and has established a great reputation for itself within the web design community.

This free web design training resource runs through the path of building websites, games, and apps in an engaging way, easing users in gently with a very basic first lesson.

The site also features a social network aspect, meaning users can interact with and learn alongside friends and colleagues. And, like Treehouse, the team at Codecademy also understand the power of a badge, offering them at various key points in the training.

2. Webdesigntuts+

web design training

Webdesigntuts+ offers a huge range of tutorials on a wide range of web design and web development topics for free. There’s also a premium area with paid content. The site’s part of the wider Tuts+ network, which includes PSD Tuts for Photoshop tutorials and WP Tuts for WordPress tutorials.

3. Sitepoint

web design training

Australian company Sitepoint makes its money selling web design and development books, but that doesn’t stop it providing some fantastic tutorials on its site for free. These tend towards the techie, but there are also some useful introductions to web design for beginners, such as this article on HTML and CSS.

4. Udacity

web design training

Want to learn how to build a simple web browser in just seven weeks? Or how to build a search engine like Google? Well, with Udacity you can do both and best of all the training is absolutely free and is led by expert professors from Stanford and the University of Virginia.

For anyone interested, courses are not offered on-demand. Instead, prospective students can visit the website for a class schedule and enrol accordingly.

5. LearnToProgram.tv

If you’re interested in web development as a career but you don’t really know where to start, this short, fast-paced course might be just the thing to you. Hosted by Mark Lassoff,LearnToProgram.tv’sroduction to Web Development is designed to give you a preview of the life of a web developer.

Using fast-paced lectures, code samples and lab exercises, it’ll introduce you to HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, teaching you techniques used by professional web developers every day. The standard price doe the course is $59, but if you use the link provided you can sign up for free.

6. Khan Academy

What started as a way for Salman Khan to tutor his cousins remotely has grown into an enormous free online learning resource. Khan Academy wants to provide a free world-class education for everyone, and boasts a dizzying collection of courses, mainly covering more traditional subjects such as maths and science.

Computing subject aren’t so well served, but if you want to learn JavaScript then you’re in luck. It features three JavaScript courses that’ll teach you the fundamentals of programming: an introduction to JS, teaching you enough of the basics to be able to draw and animate; and two advanced courses aimed around games and visualisations, and natural simulations.

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: Online Courses

Learning web development

15 March, 2015 by Jakob

To be a web developer, you will need to master quite a few concepts, such as user interface design, server side programming, client side programming, utilizing a database, etc.

Learning to develop web applications is hard. Don’t doubt it. Forget about all the outlets promising you to become a developer in 24 hours, a week, a month. Forget about the ones that tell you things like ‘this is the only thing you’ll need to learn’.

To cut the story short let me begin by asking this simple questions:

Where to start?

I find it easier to learn something if you have a concrete project in mind. This will let you apply the theory you learn in a real life context. If you don’t have one, I can propose you one: a web site that lets users post photos, vote on them and comment them. You’ll need to build an admin section as well where you can manage your site, your users and the content. Think of any other features you’d like to implement in your website: tagging, geolocation, applying filters on photos, … The only limit is your own creativity!

What to learn/know?

1. Decide your path and learn the language

  • C#: The C# language, together with the Microsoft .NET platform and the ASP.NET MVC framework is especially well-suited if your main operating system is Microsoft Windows. C#, although possible, doesn’t run well on Mac OS X nor Linux. It is the language of choice for many established corporations.
  • Ruby: Ruby together with the Ruby on Rails framework is a very popular framework for building web applications. Its community is wide and always helpful. You will find many resources online to help you with your learning.
  • Python: Python is often seen as a competing language to Ruby. The language itself is very well-suited for learning how to code. When it comes to developing web applications, there’s the Django framework. I personally find that there are less resources available online for beginners but that is not a showstopper.

2. Know the “common knowledge”

    • HTML and CSS
      HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is by using HTML that you instruct web browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc…) which elements a web page will contain. A paragraph, a header, a bullet points list, an image and so on.CSS, the acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, is responsible for telling a browsers how HTML elements shouldlook. The font color, the size of images, the position of your paragraphs and much more.To learn both HTML and CSS at the same time, get the book Head First HTML and CSS.
    • A version control system (Git)
      Git is a version control system. It keeps track of changes in your code files and allows you to revert them at an earlier stage if you made a mistake. If you later plan to work with other coders, using a version control system is not an option. There are many different version control systems such as Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Mercurial, SVN or Git. Go with Git.Learn Git here: Learn to use Git and remote repositories in 15 minutes
    • SQL
      In order to create dynamic web apps, at some point, you will need to store data. Any kind of data. Whether blog posts, user profiles, player scores and so on. That’s what databases are for. In order to navigate through a structured database, you make use of one language called Structured Query Language or SQL for short.Read: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (4th Edition).

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: Learning web development

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