I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol
Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.
Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd "Nimrod" in a 1940's cartoon to sarcastically refer to Elmer as a great hunter. At that time I think most people probably got the biblical reference. Over time that word morphed into meaning something like an idiot to most Americans due to that cartoon.
The same thing happened to the word "Acme" - the coyote in the road runner cartoons bought all his devices from the "Acme Corporation". Acme means the best/peak and it was a sarcastic reference to none of the gadgets ever working. Now most American's think Acme means generic/bad.
They should have kept the name as Nimrod and named the package manager Acme instead of Nimble.
If you are into podcasts Steve McConnell (the author) was a guest a couple of months ago on the pragmatic engineer podcast. My one take away from that podcast was just how young and new in his career he was when he wrote that book.
Yes. And if you read his other books, you'll see that he was trying to create positive change in programming over and over again, but steadily climbed what part of the organizational ladder he was trying to address.
That book, being the first, is pretty squarely aimed at shortening the journey from junior programmer to senior.
Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.
that will ensure screenreaders skip all your page "chrome" and make life much easier for a lot of folks. As a bonus mark any navigation elements inside main using <nav> (or role="navigation").
I’m not a blind person but I was curious about once when I tried to make a hyper-optimized website. It seemed like the best way to please screen readers was to have the navigation HTML come last, but style it so it visually comes first (top nav bar on phones, left nav menu on wider screens).
Props to you for taking the time to test with a screen reader, as opposed to simply reading about best practices. Not enough people do this. Each screen reader does things a bit differently, so testing real behavior is important. It's also worth noting that a lot of alternative input/output devices use the same screen reader protocols, so it's not only blind people you are helping, but anyone with a non-traditional setup.
Navigation should come early in document and tab order. Screen readers have shortcuts for quickly jumping around the page and skipping things. It's a normal part of the user experience. Some screen readers and settings de-prioritize navigation elements in favor of reading headings quickly, so if you don't hear the navigation right away, it's not necessarily a bug, and there's a shortcut to get to it. The most important thing to test is whether the screen reader says what you expect it to for dynamic and complex components, such as buttons and forms, e.g. does it communicate progress, errors, and success? It's usually pretty easy to implement, but this is where many apps mess up.
”Each screen reader does things a bit differently, so testing real behavior is important.”
Correction: each screen reader + os + browser combo does things a bit differently, especially on multilanguage React sites. It is a full time job to test web sites on screen readers.
If only there was a tool that would comprehensively test all combos on all navigation styles (mouse, touch, tabbing, screen reader controls, sip and puff joysticks, chin joysticks, eye trackers, Braille terminals, etc)… but there isn’t one.
Wouldn’t that run afoul of other rules like keeping visual order and tab order the same? Screen reader users are used to skip links & other standard navigation techniques.
Just to say, that makes your site more usable in text browsers too, and easier to interact with the keyboard.
I remember HTML has an way to create global shortcuts inside a page, so you press a key combination and the cursor moves directly to a pre-defined place. If I remember that right, it's recommended to add some of those pointing to the menu, the main content, and whatever other relevant area you have.
Not a front end engineer but I imagine this boilerplate allows the JavaScript display engine of choice to be loaded and then rendered into that DIV rather than having any content on the page itself.
It's because "modern" web developers are not writing web pages in standard html, css or js. Instead, they use javascript to render the entire thing inside a root element.
This is now "standard" but breaks any browser that doesn't (or can't) support javascript. It's also a nightmare for SEO, accessibility and many other things (like your memory, cpu and battery usage).
I started around the same time. No unit tests but we did have code reviews because of ISO 9001 requirements. That meant printing out the diffs on the laser printer and corralling 3 people into a meeting room to pour over them and then have them literally sign off on the change. This was for an RTOS that ran big industrial controls in things like steel plants and offshore oil rigs.
Project management was a 40 foot Gantt chart printed out on laser printer paper and taped to the wall. The sweet sound of waterfall.
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