Go Vertical
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.
Front-end Development
We’ve written 46 blog posts about Front-end Development. View all topics »
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Making Front-end Development a Team Sport
“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.
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Re-cognition
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.
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Beyond Binary Grids
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.
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Expanding The Box
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.
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If you could learn anything, what would it be?
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.”
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Preprocess THIS!
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.
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The Importance of Conventions
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.
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More or LESS?
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.
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The Gift of Giving
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.
