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Front-end Development

We’ve written 46 blog posts about Front-end Development. View all topics »

  1. Go vertical ypc

    Go Vertical

    Headshot of Anthony Colangelo

    3/21/13

    by Anthony Colangelo

    Devices come in all shapes and sizes—from iPhones, to the massive Galaxy Note, to the tall-but-skinny Nexus 7, to 10-inch iPads, and massive, 30-inch displays.

  2. Team sport

    Making Front-end Development a Team Sport

    Headshot of Jenn Lukas

    3/7/13

    by Jenn Lukas

    “All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed,” is one of the many ideas behind documents such as Rick Waldon’s Idiomatic JS and Nicolas Gallagher’s Idiomatic CSS.

  3. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v105 00 SS

    Re-cognition

    Headshot of Alison Harshbarger

    12/20/12

    by Alison Harshbarger

    As we near the end of December, it’s pretty natural to begin to reflect on the past year. Cognition is the place where we share new processes and create a dialogue around new ideas. In the spirit of reflection and end-of-year lists, here are the top five trafficked Cognition posts of 2012 and some parting thoughts from an alternate point of view.

  4. Hc blog Main Article Illustration SC

    Beyond Binary Grids

    Headshot of Stephen Caver

    12/13/12

    by Stephen Caver

    Grids are everywhere on the web, and there is no hiding from them. We need grid systems to help create grids that are usable and manageable, and with Responsive Web Design, this has been a tricky tightrope to walk. We need our layouts to react to different media query breakpoints, and the way we have built grids in the past needs to be extended to do that.

  5. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v96 00 YPC

    Expanding The Box

    Headshot of Mark Huot

    10/18/12

    by Mark Huot

    I always hear stories of managers pushing employees to “think outside the box”—to go beyond their day-to-day and find that idea that is unlike anything else. This is a tall order and maybe even a bit unrealistic. If our comfort zone is A, B, and C, how can we expect to find X without first understanding D–W? Because of this, I like to think in terms of “expanding the box” instead of jumping entirely outside of it.

  6. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v91 00 MJ

    If you could learn anything, what would it be?

    Headshot of Jenn Lukas

    9/20/12

    by Jenn Lukas

    This can be absolutely anything. Go ahead and think about it for a minute. I recently posed this question at my dConstruct talk (slides / audio) a couple of weeks ago and received a variety of answers. Learning a new language was a popular response. So was learning how to cook, garden, ski, and do “The Robot.”

  7. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v92

    Preprocess THIS!

    Headshot of Allison Wagner

    9/13/12

    by Allison Wagner

    A while ago I wrote a little post discussing my dive into CSS preprocessing, and, at the time, I wasn’t totally convinced that this hot newness was the best approach for my workflow. I shared my internal struggle with bloated output and questioned if this preprocessor business really did save me that much time. When I wrote the article, I had only worked with LESS, one of several popular CSS preprocessors, as it was a project requirement. Many of you fine folks suggested (both on Cognition and off) that I try Sass. Well, I did. Fast-forward 10 months and HOLY TOLEDO THIS FRONT-END DEV IS SERIOUSLY SASSY AND LOVING IT.

  8. Jl jr

    The Importance of Conventions

    Headshot of Jenn Lukas

    5/3/12

    by Jenn Lukas

    Flashback to the mid 90s. You are rocking your Prodigy dial-up, excited to play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You click a link to the game, wait 5 minutes for the page to load, and are confused when you are staring at bright green fluorescent text telling you to “Invest $100k” instead of calculating Leondardo DiCaprio’s Bacon number.

  9. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v62 2

    More or LESS?

    Headshot of Allison Wagner

    1/26/12

    by Allison Wagner

    I love writing CSS. I really do. I love spinning straw into gold, rescuing HTML elements from browser default styles, curving corners, softening colors, and cushioning containers. I love abstracting complex design systems into powerful classes and efficient declarations while minding the cascade and the rules of inheritance and specificity. I see a site’s visual design as one giant puzzle, patiently waiting to be analyzed, broken down into component parts, and built back up again. I easily spend 70% of my time at Happy Cog developing the presentation layer, so I’ve had my eye on the hot newness that is the Sass / LESS / CSS preprocessor movement for a little while now.

  10. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v58 00 MJ

    The Gift of Giving

    Headshot of Jenn Lukas

    12/15/11

    by Jenn Lukas

    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.