Comments for Webstyle Magazine

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Brent

Brent — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:09:37 +0000

Hey Peter and AppHacker, right on. I agree completely.

Regarding the article, I think that it could be re-titled, “Why you should pay your Front-End Developer more than your Back-End one!”

Comment on Dark Chocolate and Basil Truffles by Christine

Christine — Mon, 16 May 2011 04:59:41 +0000

I did the ganache with white chocolate to get a light green colour and when it was set, rolled it into balls that I dipped in milk chocolate, which oes hard around the outside so you bite into a soft centre, yum!

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by JSHint, Spy gadgets, Facebook photos facts, Heart and Sole, 8-bit web, and bad PHP | Serene Global

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:30:38 +0000

[...] reasons front-end developers’ lives are [...]

Comment on Herbalism: Open Source Medicine by Mixer Blog

Mixer Blog — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:10:19 +0000

Poultice Mixer Used For Healing…

[...] be where a patient had an acute heart attack that posed imminent danger. Howeve [...]…

Comment on When To Give Up Free by Natalie Jost

Natalie Jost — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:25:40 +0000

That’s a good point about Google Analytics, and now that you mention it there are probably quite a few other similar products out there. Also a good note about donating time too. If there are products or services you use that could use your help in return, that’s a great way to “pay” them back for what they do for you. Thanks, Gilbert!

Comment on When To Give Up Free by Gilbert

Gilbert — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:02:42 +0000

I think “free” is too complex an issue to have a single set of rules that you use to decide whether or not you should pay for a service. It really depends on the motivation of the product creator. Some are trying to build a massive customer base. Others don’t realise how their free product will take over their time and jeopardise their other sources of income, while others may not have the confidence that someone would pay for a product they have created.

There’s a saying, “If the product’s free then you’re the product”. This rings true for a lot of products such as Google Analytics where the aggregate of the data that they collect is very valuable to them as a company and so mass adoption is via free accounts is critical for them.

For others, freemium is a legitimate model to help them get their product to the critical mass where people will sign up for the premium accounts.

But I believe that web designers and agencies should donate to free libraries such as JQuery that help them save so much time and effort. That could be a financial contribution or by giving back in terms of providing time to help solve bugs etc.

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Natalie Jost

Natalie Jost — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:20:57 +0000

As a front-ender myself, I got a headache reading this, and the comments. I think just reading this article will snip a couple of months off my life.

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Peter

Peter — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:49:12 +0000

Thanks for the sympathy. Number 6 should be “Front engineers have to invent ways of solving problems that should be done at the back-end” ;-)

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Apphacker

Apphacker — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:20:38 +0000

I didn’t find this funny at all. In fact it bothers me quite a bit that ‘front-end’ engineers are pigeonholed into engineers-lite. I write a lot of JavaScript. We have to worry about memory use, performance, dom and event life cycles, caching, an asynchronous and state-less environment, disparate data sources and the like. We use git and we do run builds that run tests, check jslint, and run the Closure Compiler. Just a tiny bit of the work we do involves some HTML & CSS does not mean we are nothing more than glorified DreamWeaver experts. And really how many backend programmers are writing a website’s backend in C? And why is that important anyway? Backend programmers write code that runs on maybe hundreds to thousands of machines and us front-end engineers write code that runs on hundreds of thousands to millions of machines. Heh.

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Joce

Joce — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:51:58 +0000

Our iteration loops are quite tight as well. Maybe not as tight as a web front end designer, but quite tight. Modif code, compile, check that it works, etc etc.
Having a tight iteration loop isn’t incompatible with a VCS. You branch from the trunk for each new feature, checkin at will within the branch, and merge back completed feature branches in the trunk (ideally after code review).
Failing to use a VCS is not only reckless, it’s amateurism.

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Jerome Gravel-Niquet

Jerome Gravel-Niquet — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:49:10 +0000

I don’t agree with the version control statement. I’m a front-end developer and I use git all the time. I agree that since there’s a quick visual response from refreshing a page and then you adjust something and see again if it works, git gets in the way sometimes. But in the end, I usually commit once per 2 hours or so. That’s about the time it takes to code a “normal” page in HTML/CSS/JS.

I also don’t agree with the “view source” statement. If your semantics or whatever looks ugly, it doesn’t matter much in the end. Get over that pride! ;)

I understand this post was written with a slight humorous tone, so I won’t strictly hold you to those statements. :)

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Tweets that mention 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter -- Topsy.com

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:19:08 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ara Pehlivanian, Ara Pehlivanian, jsbournival, Sylvain Bouchard, Daniel Gálvez and others. Daniel Gálvez said: RT @ara_p: 5 Reasons Front-End Developers' Lives Are Shorter by @jsbournival http://t.co/r5htaEi #webstylemag [...]

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Jean-Sébastien Bournival

Jean-Sébastien Bournival — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:14:53 +0000

I think it’s part of their workflow: frequent deployment + quick visual response. These source code management tools, plus build and deployment process, are slowing them down.

Nonetheless, in the end, they’ll die before you do.

Comment on 5 Reasons Front-End Developers’ Lives Are Shorter by Joce

Joce — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:55:20 +0000

Any idea why front end guys are not at ease with VCSes? (note: Git, subversion, etc are usually referred to as VCS (Version Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control).
That seems extremely weird from the perspective of someone using git non only for code, but for everything text (configuration files for most of my software, documentation, reports, etc).

Comment on The Trends Of Yesteryear And The Trends Of Today by Tweets that mention The trends of yesteryear and the trends of today -- Topsy.com

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:05:45 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ara Pehlivanian, Webstyle Magazine. Webstyle Magazine said: The trends of yesteryear and the trends of today – http://wsm.ag/1z [...]