1,740 karma · joined April 4, 2014
No, that would be fucking weird too, dude.
I love/hate that era so much.
I've always loved the existence of "rebeccapurple", but I somehow missed that part of the story. Her color being immortalized in the CSS logo (even if it changes years from now) is so incredibly beautiful to me.
1. Dead-simple staging environments
2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.
3. Dead-simple backup/restore features
4. Simplified cache-management
And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.
I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.
But the solution was to eliminate the release manager role and move QA away from testing individual tickets and instead toward developing/managing automated testing. And then the devs had to pick up the QA and release responsibilities without any change in our original responsibilities.
Which means that I now waste a massive chunk of my work week doing things other than write code. All the while they're making a big stink about "coding days". Which has pretty much never ended well for developers. I'm sure next they'll be counting total lines of code, too.
Maybe this is an annual payment thing? Because I paid monthly and cancelled the other day online and it offered to refund me back $2 and some change left in my current month.
I would jump right into modern things like flexbox and the grid system as the old ways of floating are basically useless. I mean they still work, but I can't remember the last time I had to use a float to create new layout. Start with flex, as it's a bit more beginner friendly than grid is. I've been doing this for nearly 20 years now and I still struggle to wrap my head around grid sometimes.
You can ignore BEM until you've got the fundamentals sorted. BEM is just a clean standardized way to organize class/id names, it's nothing functional.
Sass helps streamline things a lot via nesting and variables to begin with. More advanced features can also be useful, but until you've got the fundamentals it may not be clear where those advanced features can be applied. And Sass requires substantial more initial setup than plain CSS (you'll need Webpack or gulp or something to turn the Sass into CSS). Not to mention that Sass's biggest draw is variables and nested styles, which CSS now supports natively (albeit with really weird syntaxes, imo). So I'd skip Sass for now.
And yes, you can jump into an existing page and tweak it. That's how I learned it initially. https://csszengarden.com is a good resource for that. It's the same basic HTML site with different CSS themes you can load. It's a good showcase of how powerful CSS is what you can do with it without touching the underlying HTML. Dev tools are very useful there as you can turn individual styles off, change their values, etc.
Lastly, I'd just start with a blank page and try to create a simple 2-column layout. Narrow left column with a basic navigation in it and a wide right column with a few paragraphs of text in it. Then build off of that -- add a header and a footer. See if you can get the header to "stick" while you scroll down the page, etc.
Like seriously go to any store that sells Lego and you'll see that a good 80% of it is bulk or play sets. There are a lot of things to be critical of lego for...the pricing, the over-reliance on licensed sets, too many god-damned stickers, etc. But this really isn't one of them at all.
Then Chrome rose to power, which is repeating some of MS's failures with "their own damn standards" here and there, but is largely avoiding the big failures because the browsers update themselves now. Shy of people being stuck on X version because of their work situation, you don't have to worry about a huge chunks of your userbase being stuck on a 5 year old browser anymore because most folks are getting auto-updated and those updates aren't arbitrarily locked behind OS versions like IE was.
Or, I can say "dad, check out this logitech kb. It's affordable and you can pick how loud you want it to be".
Literally that simple. Start looking at things through the eyes of your parents or grandparents and you start to see how fucking complicated and confusing a lot of this shit is. It's no wonder at all that Logitech is coming out with something simple with streamlined options.
Other mechanical keyboards have different switch-types listed, but even as a user of a mech keyboard for a decade now I couldn't tell you which is which without looking it up. Logitech simplified it with "Tactile Quiet", "Linear", and "Clicky". You immediately know which style is for you without having to consult some switch tactile/loudness chart or ask the mechanical keyboard cult for their take. They've lowered the bar of entry into the mechanical keyboard market. Do other companies do the same or go the extra mile to simplify the process? Probably, but it carries a lot more weight when the biggest name in computer peripherals does it.
As for me, I might give it a go eventually. If they take a cue from the MX mouse series with how damn customizable it is binding buttons to actions, then I'll definitely be grabbing it.