The Day I Learned to Think Like a Browser

I remember vividly my first major coding project that I made real money on. My job was supposed to be a backend caching piece and doing enough of the frontend that a designer could lay out the page. The problem was, this designer used a Mac and the primary user of the application was still on IE6. After lots of back and forth rendering issues were going to cause the project to not get delivered on time, I was told to just keep working with the designer.

I decided to take matters into my own hands, and sat down at Starbucks resolving to not get up until the place closed down or I had the problem fixed completely. After a little digging, I realized that the box model used by IE6 was completely different than Chrome / Firefox and the designer had no way to design for it or to even test it, he was just throwing changes over the wall without any ability to make sure they were going to work. One change broke six other things.

I found a service that allowed me to test on various platforms and set about ascertaining how bad it was. I soon realized that to fix it, I needed to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch. Took about 6 hours of straight work and my hail mary effort saved the project. I did the rest of the layout work going forward.