So you wanna be a front end developer?
Filed Under (Coding) by Olle on 13-05-2009
Back in the day when I was a young boy in the big IT-industry I wanted to become the greatest front end developer the web had seen. Due to circumstances, out of my hands of course, I did not reach my goal, but I did get to “know” some great ones along the way!
So I guess you possibly have some schooling to bring to the table, or you have been working with back-end stuff stuff for quite some time, you know what object oriented programming is or at least want to learn, and most importantly you have the will to learn!
When I started to become really interested in front end development back in the late 90′s, front end development was not looked upon as real programming, real programming was C++, Java and the likes. But now, we have job titles like Senior Front End Developer at for instance Yahoo and Google, so I guess that the understanding of the importance of good front end code has really elevated.
So my way of learning the craftsmanship, was to study the masters below, downloaded their code, read it, and then write my own! If it worked for me, I’m sure it will for you!
Scott Andrew LePera
What really got me started was a guy named Scott Andrew LePera(http://www.scottandrew.com/). He got me all warm and fuzzy talking about for instance event handlers in javascript and how event bubbles
Aaron Boodman
After that I stumbled over Aaron Boodman, the youngpup (and creator of Greasemonky among things) showed me all about how to create the menus that we love to have, how to make the Javascripts run smooth in animations, and how drag of elements shall be done. Back in the beginning of the 2000 he had the coolest UI on his blog, and nothing I have seen since has turned me on as much as viewing youngpup.net for the first time(except possibly 13thparallel)!
13thparallel
13thparallel made me think about coding for portability, introduced me to the concept of the Viewport among other things.
WebFX
Emil A Eklund and Erik Arvidsson at WebFX showed me that it was possible to create a forum on the web with outstanding functionality and speed(unfortunately it only looks good in MS IE), how to work with XML in advanced Javascript.
Peter-Paul Koch @Quirksmode
Quirksmode helped me really understand the differences between browsers and what do do about it. He also really introduced me to Unobtrusive JavaScript.
Remember that most of the examples above have been written back in 2001-2002, and they still work..What does this tell us, well to use the standards, and no browser specific hack, because browsers change and you will end up chasing your own tail to make things work in new browsers.
