Category: Web

The mantra from most in the diverse digital world is ‘keep on learning new stuff’ and ‘look out for the next big thing to improve your workflow’. Be it a new framework, plug in or software package. If you attend any of the many tech meet ups in London which I frequently do, you often leave the event feeling dizzy and a little disorientated. You are told by a multitude of strangers that you simply must learn this new ‘must have’ addition to your skill set. It’s in huge demand and clients in no time at all will be grabbing your from the streets. It’s a ‘win win’ you’re told.

Well this week, I decided to take a step back into the world of photoshop. Creatives have been using photoshop for over 25 years now. I remember learning the basics of photoshop many years ago and I was taken back by the power (and complexity) of the package. I have developed a pretty sound knowledge of the common tools and use them on a daily basis. But I’ve been increasingly conscious that I haven’t used the really advanced features and have not really kept up to the date with the many updates. It’s mainly due to the type of projects I often work on (as well as the inevitable tight deadlines), that I have used photoshop in a pretty limited way.

So I decided to go back in time and spend time actually learning the more advanced features photoshop and aimed to deepen my knowledge, without the pressure of a client looking over my shoulder and the constraints of working on a project that needs to be delivered yesterday. The learning process has been a huge amount of fun, as well as being enlightening to an extent I had never imagined. It’s dawned on me that so there are so many features and tools which would help quicken my workflow and increase the quality of my work.

Camera raw is a wonderful tool which I simply was not utilizing to the full. Using adjustment layers and masks in partnership with smart objects was an area I believed I had a good handle on. Well, I really do have a good knowledge now. Layer blending and advanced layer effects have been a revelation to me and I’ve enjoyed learning the new selection techniques (I have no idea why I used the colour range so infrequently).

So it’s been a full-on, but a really productive week. The client I’ve been working with have not needed my services this week, due to the inevitable changing deadlines, and I have used my time off pretty well. I just need now some exciting creative projects to work on and use my honed photoshop skills.

It’s the little things in life which often give you the most happiness. It’s often claimed you don’t have to spend money to attain happiness and I’ve come across something which will cause me many hours of happiness. And I’ve not spent a single penny. I have been spending much of my spare time in recent years coding and I have found a toy which will make my time battling with functions, components, frameworks and modules a lot easier and more enjoyable.

I’ve been a sublime text fan for a good year. It seemed to tick all the boxes for what I needed from a text editor. But I recently completed an Angular 2 tutorial and the teacher highly recommended using Visual Studio Code. It’s been a fantastic switch for me. Visually stunning and a set of tools which really makes coding a pleasure. The guys at Microsoft have done a great job. It’s free, lightweight and so easy to install.

There are so many features which I find so useful. The side-by-side editing, user friendly Command Palette, help with creating your functions, debugging tools, close integration with Git, the scope of third-party extensions and the support for ECMAScript 6 is fantastic. The prompts caused by IntelliSense will bring a huge smile to your face. It’s been a great help to me as I increase my mastery of Angular 2.

I have no reason at all to switch back to Sublime Text. I would highly recommend you giving it a go. Now, I’m off to experiment with the color themes…….

Hello my friends, a short but for me, significant post. I’ve further developed my work environment, which I feel is much more mature, solid and productive workflow than the last one I posted.

Here’s a link to the code. This also incorporates a data.json file (a new area for me).

They will always be room for improvement and development. But I feel very happy with this resource for my future projects. As ever I’d love to get feedback from you all.

Putting together a website will always seem an incredibly complex process for me. I’m still to be convinced that a modern web development workflow really needs to be so complicated. I guess a robust, cross-browser, multi-device, engaging site needs a file system that’s complex and comprehensive.

I’ve put together a workflow which has taken some months to refine, tweak and hopefully perfect. It works for me and, for now, it serves my purposes. I have no doubt it will forever remain a work-in-progress. I use gulp to help manage all the files and to keep the monotonous tasks to a minimum. It helps me at the level I’m at now and sure there are added plugins which can help me.

I’d love any feedback or comments.

They say a week is a long time in the world of politics, but the pace of change in the field of web development is incomparable. The speed of change in the world of front end web development is often bewildering and difficult to keep up with. I put the finishing touches to my first site about eight months ago. It really does seem like a lifetime ago. It’s difficult to comprehend the difference in the way that site was built and how my new site was structured.

It’s gratifying to see a real demonstration of how much I’ve learnt in the past year. Thinking back to how I built my first site, I’m amazed by just how I made things difficult for myself. There were a large array of css files, each individually linked to the head of the HTML file. In fact there were no less than 18 CSS files. The main CSS file stretched to over 1,200 lines with the media queries placed at the bottom. The site was responsive……to a degree. Looking back it’s a wonder that working on the site didn’t lead me to the brink of insanity. I had made a token attempt to use SASS to try and bring a little order structure of the file system, but it was a half-hearted attempt at best.

It was a similar story with respect to my JavaScript files. Bloated files were linked to the master html file and plugins were used to perform simple actions which I could have coded myself. Images were not properly compressed and how the site would download successfully without a long delay, will always remain a mystery to me. The html file was made up of a vast collection of classes and ID’s which would have perplexed the most experienced web developer. It was frankly a mess.

For my new site, I used Gulp as my choice of build system. I minified my CSS and JavaScript files and all were concatenated into single CSS and JS files which are linked to my index html file. SASS has been used in a much more measured and structured way, which has helped to simplify my workflow greatly. Using media queries in each individual SCSS file has been a joy. Images have been compressed and I’m sure my site will download a lot quicker. CDN’s have been utilised where possible and using an autoprefixer has saved me a time and a fair degree of pain. The plumber plugin has helped deal with the inevitable errors and setting up a live server has further improved the speed of my workflow. And finally, with experience, my HTML file is now a lot leaner and semantic.

I have no doubt that in eight months from now, when I work on another refresh of my site, I’ll laugh at the primitive work environment I’ve set up. But for now, I’m enjoying coding a whole lot more than was the case during the start of the year. I hope you enjoying viewing my new site.

This quote by Linus Torvalds is a source of support and reassurance as my education in coding continues. My JavaScript masterly, though has some way to go (I sense I’ll be saying this for sometime to come) but I’ve had a good couple of weeks. What’s really energised me is the fact I’ve enjoyed going to several meet ups in London.

I spent a day with the guys and girls at CodeAcademy on Saturday. We camped in the reception of the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch. It was evidently okay for us to piggy-bank on their wifi and the mood of the place was animated and vibrant. I had ever come across the place before and I had a very productive day. The turnout of coders were not as high as usually is the case by all accounts, but the place was very busy nonetheless. I spent the day ploughing through the Basic Algorithm Scripting exercises on the Free Code Camp site. I got help from more experienced coders and all in all, I went home happy after a good 6 hour JavaScript bonanza.

I then went to the Founders and Coders bi-monthly meet up near Mile End on Monday evening. It was an open session for coders to come together and share their knowledge and experience of coding a variety of languages. I didn’t do much coding during the evening but I got the benefit listening to coders with an advanced knowledge of JavaScript. It confirmed that I seem to be on the right track.

My plans for the coming week can be summarised below:

• Continue to use Eloquent JavaScript, written by Marijn Haverbeke as my main book resource
• Complete the video course ‘JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts’ by Anthony Alicea. I found this course on the Udemy site and I’m delighted that it’s so widely regarded amongst coders. It really goes into detail of what is go on ‘under the hood’ with JavaScript and it gives you a real depth to your understanding of the programme. It covers Scope, closures, prototypes, ‘this’, builds your own framework, and more. There’s a total of 85 tutorials encompassing 11.5 hours. It’s a hugely enjoyable and informative course.
• Work my way through the exercises on FreeCodeCamp and CodeWars

Will keep you all posted of my progress. The ride’s been enjoyable thus far.

So my focus really has been on JavaScript these past few weeks. I’ve had a complete change of mind-set and it’s paying dividends for me (well I think it’s paying dividends).

I think my experience is similar to many from my background. That is from a visual design background. Learning HTML and CSS was a very pleasurable introduction to the web development world and then the first stages of learning JavaScript was akin to experiencing a slow, mental car crash. I remember going to the pub following the first JavaScript class at GA. Lots of confused, furrowed brows and pained expressions. We had sailed trough the early stages of the course and suddenly we have to confront mastering functions, loops, objects, methods and expressions. With hindsight, for a part-time course introducing students to web development, there was only so much ground you can cover in mastering JavaScript. It was a pretty tough initiation as I recall.

So I guess I was guilty of focusing in on what I really liked. Ensuring the webpages I was building were visually stunning and ensuring the code was semantic and following best practices was my early focus. But it slowly dawned on me that I needed to learn JavaScript to a really decent level. At almost every web networking event I attended, the message was simple. You’re not going to succeed in the world of web development without mastering JavaScript. The message was unrelenting.

I have made good progress recently in developing a good working environment. I’ve spent time focusing on Gulp, SASS, Compass, Bower, Node.js and CSS frameworks. But I recognised I really needed to up my JS knowledge. So I’ve devoured JS tutorials and exercises all over the web. Lynda, Tutsplus, Code School, Codecademy, the Mozilla Developer Network, github, StackOverflow, CodePen and Udemy have helped me enormously in giving me a solid mastery of basic JavaScript principals.

Now, I just need to focus on moving on from this basic knowledge to intermediate level. It’s challenging but greatly rewarding. How Objects interact with the DOM no longer confuse me and I actually enjoy dealing with Functions. My fellow students would smile hearing me talk so positively when it comes to JavaScript. I’m in a privileged position where I can have a couple of weeks off work to really speed up my JS skill level. The next few weeks I sense will be very productive for me.

I’m a bit of an old hand when it comes to online development video tutorials. I could give you a pretty good review of all the most popular sites which offer online courses in just about every area of web development.

I’ve used sites such as Lynda, Udemy, CodeSchool, TutsPlus and Code Academy extensively. Looking back now, as I’ve become more experienced, I’ve become ever more aware of the varying quality of the teaching. But on the whole, they have been very good for me and my education in learning how to code. The course at General Assembly gave me a good basic foundation of knowledge and the courses have further advanced my mastery in the field of web development.

One course I’m about to finish has been especially good and a real help to me in consolidating my understanding of a number of key areas which I need to learn to an advanced level. From the Udemy website and titled Git a Web Developer Job: Mastering the Modern Workflow by Brad Schiff, it outlines how the tutor puts together his well-honed work environment in building a website. I have completed courses on Git, Node.js, Gulp, object-orientated JS, BEM (which I’m not really sure about), webpack, Babel and responsive design. But in this course, all these features were used in coding a single page website within a really solid, easy to set up work environment. You are also exposed to areas such as automatic sprites, CSS animation and post-CSS. It’s a 15 hour course and with a discount, I only paid £10 access for all 61 lectures.

It has given me another boost to my confidence and I’ve learnt so many new tricks. The aim of the course is to ensure that good working practices are followed; clean, semantic code building a website which loads quickly and works across all browsers. Will certainly look out for any further courses by Brad. This course offers excellent value for money. Even more experienced developers would benefit from taking the course.