Show notes
It’s another potluck episode in which Wes and Scott answer your questions! This month - working with designers, criticisms of WordPress, avoiding burnout, time management, and more.
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Show Notes 5:05 - How can you help a designer understand how styling works and how layouts work in the web? In other words: How do I explain my boundaries as a front-end developer to a designer?
- Work closely with the designer
- Allow the designer to push your limits
- You can help them understand by:
- Showing them poor performing websites
- Showing them things that usually are taxing on the GPU to paint - rotations, background images, drop shadows, etc.
- Don’t be afraid to let a tough design push your boundaries
13:23 - How do you manage your time for learning new things when you have children and a daily full-time job?
- Those who figure out how to make it a priority will win out
- Family first - talk to your spouse
- Ask your boss for time to learn and grow
- Find ways to get paid for learning
19:45 - How do you deal with burnout in this constantly evolving front end tech ecosystem?
25:00 - Do you code at night (past 9pm)?
- Start your wind-down time earlier
- Let your brain wok on problems while you sleep
- Get it out of your head
- Listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
29:23 - How do you compress your videos/audio for your courses/tutorials?
- Handbrake Fast 1080
- Use presets
- Output from video editor, rip from YouTube, or compress directly from video editor
33:10 - It seems like in the web dev community, a lot of people give WordPress crap. Any idea why?
- WordPress is dope - people just like to complain.
- WordPress is often one of the first things people learn and have bad memories of it
- It’s easy to write bad code with WordPress
- It can be slow
- It can attract a certain type of developer
33:10 - What are some of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are learning programming and what’s the best way to overcome them?
- Don’t focus on too many things
- Don’t worry about picking the right technology
- Focus on the fundamentals
- Let your curiosity and excitement drive you
- Celebrate wins
40:29 - What are your best tips for writing documentation?
43:08 - What are some good questions or techniques to better understand a client’s requirements?
- How does your business work right now?
- What are people coming to the website for?
- Questionnaires are good - they get people thinking
- It’s your job to understand what a client want out of a website - what problems they have and need solved
45:38 - Do you guys have any tips for taking over maintenance and development of existing websites where the previous developer is no longer reachable?
- Take time to asses the codebase before writing anything
- Learn what’s there any and why
- Don’t start ripping out code without understanding what’s really going on
- Don’t leave it worse than you found it
- It depends on the stack, but it’s probably worth giving it an honest go before re-writing the whole thing
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