Undefined

When I Get To Work With a Back End Dev Who Knows What They Are Doing

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Two weeks ago, I have written Who are my Yoda? in the web universe, specifically in the front-end universe.

Yoda is a person who you can admire, she/he can inspire you and she/he teach you.

So, here is the second part of my Jedi Masters:

• Eric A. Meyer: Eric ‘father of CSS’ Meyer is an expert on the subjects of CSS and Web standards. He has written several books on CSS (including “Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide” for O’Reilly and Associates) and his CSS Reset has been the initial source for all of the other CSS Resets used by other CSS Frameworks. You can follow him on twitter via @meyerweb.

• John Resig: John is the father and creator of jQuery. He’s also the author of the books Pro JavaScript Techniques and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. Man, he created jQuery, there ain’t no more to say! You can follow him on twitter via @jeresig.

• Stoyan Stefanov: Stoyan is a great developer. He was the architect of the YSlow 2.0 performance tool and creator of the smush.it image optimization tool!. He’s the author of amazing books like JavaScript Patterns and Object-Oriented JavaScript. You can follow him on twitter via @stoyanstefanov.

• Lea Verou: Lea is awesome and the best front-end engineer. She works as a Developer Advocate for W3C and she is a member of the CSS Working Group. She is passionate about web standards (JavaScript and CSS). You can see all her open source projects and tools via Github. You can follow her on twitter via @LeaVerou.

• Luke Wroblewski: Luke is the father of Mobile First philosophy. He is a recognized digital product leader who specializes on product strategy, mobile design, interface design, user experience and information design. He gives a lot of speeches and wrote books likes Mobile First, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks and Site-seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. You can follow him on twitter via @lukew.

• Mike Taylor: Mike is a Whitespace Strategist at Opera Software. He gives a lot of cool speeches. You can follow him on twitter via @miketaylr.

• Nicholas C. Zakas: Zakas is a great front-end consultant, author, and speaker. He is a strong advocate for development best practices including progressive enhancement, accessibility, performance, scalability, and maintainability. You can follow him on twitter via @slicknet.

• Nicole Sullivan: Nicole is a web developer passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites. She loves working with diverse teams to solve hard problems on the web. You can follow her on twitter via @stubbornella.

• Paul Irish: Paul is a front-end developer who realy loves the web. He is on Google Chrome’s Developer Relations team, and was on the jQuery Team for two years. He is the createor of Modernizr, develops the webapp development workflow tool Yeoman, HTML5 Please, CSS3 Please and more open source projects. You can follow him on twitter via @paul_irish.

• Rebecca Murphey: Rebecca is a JavaScript developer currently working for Bocoup.She is a frequent speaker on the topic of code organization and best practices at events around the world. She write on her blog and it is a must-read for modern day JavaScript devs. Alos, she wrote a guide to the basics of jQuery called jqfundamentals. You can follow her on twitter via @rmurphey.

• Steve Souders: Steve is the father of web performance and explains his best practices for performance. He works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug and more open source projects. You can follow him on twitter via @souders.

• Thomas Fuchs: Thomas is the author of cool open source projects like Zepto.js and Micro.js. He is a JavaScript Guru and you can follow him on twitter via @thomasfuchs.

• TJ Holowaychuk: TJ is an awesome developer. He is the creator of the Luna programming language, Express, Stylus, Component, Mocha, Jade, rework, node-canvas and others awesome open source projects. You can follow him on twitter via @tjholowaychuk.

“May the source be with you.”

Today, I was reading an interview to Lea Verou at Appliness. And, I asked to myself: Why is Lea Verou awesome?

I thought about it for a few minutes and then I kept reading. I finally found the answer, when I read the following paragraphs:

- Do you use any frameworks when you develop? If so, do you have any favorites?

Not really. I might occasionally use jQuery or LESS or some other framework or library, but I generally try to develop at the lowest level of abstraction I can comfortably work with. I like being able to fix issues that arise on my own, I like to know what code I’m running and I don’t like making the browser download and parse stuff it’s not going to use.

I’m also paranoid about growing dependent on a framework that might become abandoned at some point. Being open source is no guarantee. Frameworks go in and out of fashion and any open source project’s community might shrink and eventually die, in the long term.

It has happened many times in projects that were once popular. I also find that often, learning to use big, complex frameworks takes the same — if not more — time than writing the subset of functionality you need yourself (and learning from that!). I’ve learned most of the JS I know by writing a 5000-line JavaScript framework of my own (with a UI addon, akin to jQuery UI!) in 2009, that I never released. I know my view is not very popular.

The dev community is often more eager to learn about frameworks and libraries than the core technologies they are built with, but it works for me. If nobody ever tried to reinvent the wheel, our cars would still roll on wood. However, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that using frameworks and libraries is bad.

If it makes you more productive and you’re able to craft better web apps with them, go for it! However, I think a solid understanding of the underlying technology always helps to use them more efficiently. In other words, use frameworks because you don’t have the time, not because you lack the knowledge.

I recommend that you read the full interview.

Enjoy it!

Un día, me preguntaron esto porque pensaron que me había ido a vivir a USA debido a que algunos de mis tweets y lo que voy escribiendo en el blog está en inglés.

Anonymous:

Che guille, estås viviendo en Argentina?.

Yo:

Si, estoy viviendo acá!

Anonymous:

Mmm, entonces por qué mierda escribís en inglés?

A nivel profesional, en el mundo del desarrollo (como pasa en otras áreas), el idioma por excelencia es el inglés. Casi toda la bibliografía, las personas que sigo en twitter y mis Yodas se comunican en este idioma.

A veces, me siento “incomunicado” y “asilado” al no poder expresarme y comunicarme con ellos siquiera en 140 caracteres… Me falta práctica!

Muchos de ustedes (gracias a sus viejos, o no) fueron hábiles y aprendieron inglés de chicos/adolescentes. La famosa frase, “Tenés que aprender, esto te va a servir en el futuro!”. Bueno, tenían razón!

En mi caso, casa de herrero cuchillo de palo, no tuve esa frase presente y mientras todos iban a inglés particular y rendían el First, yo me quedaba en mi casa jugando a la play y al counter-strike.

No reprocho nada y no me arrepiento. Siempre dije que los juegos me dieron la base de lo que sé: “Stick together team!”.

Cuando terminé el secundario y empecé a estudiar sistemas me topé con toda la bibliografía en inglés y no me quedó otra más que leer, ver videos, leer, leer… y leer. Esto fué clave y me ayudó a aprender lo que sé hasta ahora.

Quiero seguir aprendiendo y mejorar! Esto es lo que siempre me motiva para seguir adelante. De todos modos, muchas veces, hay que equivocarse para aprender.

Mi vieja, traductora de inglés (cuac), siempre me dijo que el tema del idioma es práctica, práctica y más práctica. Uno puede saber un montón pero si no se practica, las cosas se olvidan.

Es por esto que escribo en inglés, porque quiero practicar, equivocarme, que me corrijan y seguir aprendiendo.

:)

PD: pido disculpas por las burradas que vayan a leer pero pueden ayudarme a seguir aprendiendo!