The inane mutterings of Alexander Foxleigh
Hi. I'm Alex, I'm a senior full-stack developer with a passion for building performant, accessible and highly usable web applications.
You can find out more about me by reading my blog, taking a look at my website or having a look at my social links which are below in the footer.
Here is an assorted collection of my rants, ravings and general ramblings. I apologise in advance.
If you are thinking of making the leap from permanent to self-employed, then here is part one of my guide to becoming a contractor in the web industry, this guide will not just tell you how get started, but how to flourish.
I’ve been building websites for a very long time. When I first started back in the mid-late 90’s there wasn’t much of a distinction between front-end developers and back-end developers, we all had to know everything, you couldn’t specialise as there wasn’t really much of a need for that. “Build me a website” was about as much spec as you could expect.
A year ago I wrote an article on how I didn't see the point in tools like Gulp and Grunt. One year later and I have to admit, the old me was an idiot.
Today is the day. Today the people of the United Kingdom can vote to change the future of the country for the better (hopefully) but unlike elections of the past, the outcome of this one is being considered too close to call. We have the Internet to thank for that.
During the life of a developer, the tools of the job will change many times over. This is especially true of the text editor; which is often like a comfortable home for the seasoned developer. Some prefer pure text editors, some prefer an IDE, some (like myself) prefer a more hybrid approach, a text editor that is highly extensible and will provide most of the benefits of an IDE without the overhead. For me, Sublime Text 3 is the editor of choice, a decision which was confirmed when I discovered Zen coding.
Front end developers make a lot of changes during builds, especially once the codebase starts to get integrated with backend code. Rather than delete or comment out old code, why not put it in a graveyard file?
Now, this is the story, all about how my data got flipped, turned upside down so I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you why I moved my storage into the air.
A few years ago, shortly after moving from Windows to Mac (no regrets!) I discovered an amazing app called CodeKit. This wonderful app runs tasks which are things we UI developers have to do on a regular basis.