- December 15, 2011
The Gift of Giving
- @jennlukas
- Interactive Development Director
One of the interesting things about being in front-end development and the open web is that once you publish your website, anyone can see your work. Whether you use Firebug or Web Inspector or good old View Source,
you can view everything I do in a quick click. This has always been one part terrifying to me (I swear those extra spans were the CMS WYSIWYG’s idea) and three parts awesome. As someone who loves web standards and the idea of creating a better web for all, I think it’s radical to share what we do with each other. If you threw all of our code from the interwebs into one big room, it would be one heck of a learning party.
Okay so maybe all of the code would be more of a confusing kegger. Luckily, we can all pick and choose our favorite tools to learn from without a code hunting hangover. There are a few fantastic educational resources that always come to mind for me when I’m looking for the best way to solve a code conundrum. I’m always amazed at how thoughtful the answers on Stack Overflow are and how easily I can share the good parts of my code with JSFiddle. I can also share the bad parts and people can fix if it they choose at GitHub. Collaboration within the development community is getting easier every year.
So, in the holiday spirit of sharing, and with Blue Beanie Day just passing, I thought we could share our favorite resources that give back.
I’ll go first: I’ve been stoked to teach for GirlDevelopIt, a wonderful organization that offers low-cost intro development classes in an environment women can feel confident in. While I love reading and writing on this here nerd box, it’s also super neat to get in a room with 30 other people to teach and learn together.
So give back here and let’s collect the most beloved online resources in one big rager. It’s probably cheaper than that Master Chief Costume your coworker asked for in the office gift exchange. What’s the one site/group/article that you’ve loved this year?