Dear fellow developer…
… designer, hybrid or whoever dabbles with web design and development. This is a letter to you, the person who one day I will have to work with your assets, code and/or application.
I don’t care if you work at the Googleplex or from the garage of your parents house I love you all the same. I respect your work and respect you as a person. Even if you’re at sixthform or have been doing this for years, your work never ceases to amaze me and very often inspire me. That’s why every time I make a photoshop comp, write some CSS or try my hand at RoR I keep thinking of YOU! You who might one day have to work with my work, to improve it or extend it. Cause there will come a day you have to do that and according to Murphy’s law it will be the same day that you will not have all the time in the world to understand my thinking, or my coding quirks.
That is why I think of you and don’t decided to make my base font some obscure percentage of nothing and all the rest of the fonts a more obscure percentage of that! That’s why I structure my documents in some logical order, group my photoshop layers in named folders, don’t mix my template assets with the content images, try to use scripts that you will be able to find support for even if I’m not around and remove all the experimental bits of code I tried at various stages of development to test things.
I only do this so YOU (or myself a year after I have worked on something) will not want to bang your head against the wall trying to understand WHY THE FUCK I wrote this random bit of code that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere and doesn’t do anything. So when you are typing away and doing a really cute visual or some ninja stylee coding please think of ME too. I’m not asking for much.
- Organise your assets in some logical order.
- Keep versioned instances of your sitemap all in the same folder, I don’t want to be working with an outdated version of it cause the latest one is on your desktop.
- Keep versioned instances of your wireframes and visual comps. Organise your layers and give them some names so I can find them easily, remove unused stuff don’t just hide them.
- Start your css / html from scratch. Each site is your baby and you should look after it. Don’t try to adapt code from other sites. You might even find that you can now do something in a better way. Plus more often than not trying to adapt other code for a new project doesn’t save you time, it just creates breeding grounds for bugs.
- If you really, really, REALLY have to use assets from other work you have done just use the bits you need and not drag everything in the new project!
- When you are working with javascript and especially frameworks, just use the parts you need and discard the rest and PLEASE stick to one framework. I do not want to spend my youth trying to work out where the conflict is.
- Update your scripts and coding and don’t use something you downloaded back in 2004. Code is not wine to become better with the passage of time. Browsers and technology change as well as user expectations.
- At points you are happy with your code or when you plan to hand it over do a little housekeeping. Format your code so I can read it, remove the unnecessary comments, consolidate your css in a small number of files and not 19 css files for a 10 page static site!
- This would be a good time to move the hacks you so love using to an IE specific style. You know why? Because YOU CAN!
Once your site is ready for release give it to somebody else to test. Your tired eyes will not pick up the obvious mistake. Ask the guy at the next desk or your mom to use it. If they can’t find their way around, well Houston you got a problem. Plus if they manage to break the site you can fix it before it breaks on my hands and I start cursing you in Greek for not testing something you should have.
Run your site through the W3C link checker. It won’t just check for any broken links but also links to styles, images or the favicon you linked to in your header but forgot to generate! A little bit of CSS and HTML validation wouldn’t hurt either at this point. Although I know you would not build a whole site and enter all the content without running it once through a validator now would you? Of course not… I hope.
If you give your work some love not only it will love you back but when the time comes I will love you too and I will want to work with you. I will look forward to it instead of dreading the mess I will have sort through when that basecamp notice hits my mailbox informing me that the files are ready for me to work with.
With love and respect,
acidsmile
Comments
Lol…
You tell ‘em, girl.
Thank god I don’t have to go all through this, most of the code I work on is my own (or a person’s I can reach to, grab and slap).
Nice open letter… I will have it in mind next time i’ll code something…
But the thing is to make the majority of “web ppl” take these in mind! So I don’t have to re-build something from scratch because it was just… a mess!
By the way… I need to write a letter to “Web designers” too… someday! :)
@Hitman dunno if open letters make any sort of difference but this one at least did vent my frustration lol.
@Sugar I’m also lucky enough to work in a place where I can jump in anyones code and pretty much get on with things straight away even if I sometimes mumble under my breath. The whole team pride ourselves in our work.
What did tip me over was a PM I got on Friday night from a friend who needed help debugging his CSS, which was supposed to be a 5 minute job and took aaaaaages cause of some of the things mentioned above. I was in the middle of finishing off one of my jobs and I got really frustrated with what he sent me. (I was quite vocal about my thoughts though lol)
I should also admit that I do fall short of my standards too quite often due to the speed a project has to move on but I’m always conscious of that and make lists of things to check/tweak after deployment. No one is perfect I do know that damn well.
Well, let me talk like an old, but not so wise, man.
The more experience you gain the more you realize you don’t need the others. I mean, you need them, but you care less about their work, you tend to become someone who takes care for things she shouldn’t.
A bit later you stop caring at all.
A bit later you want to quit and make your own projects, because you know you can do things a lot better.
I won’t tell you the end of the story… after all it is just another old man mumbling and grumbling.