Simon Willison's Weblog: web-developers

My contract with web developer says a) she will create a unique description for each page, AND b) that she is not responsible for writing or inputting any content. Now she wants me to compose the page descriptions, citing (b). What do you think? Edit...

2013-10-31T15:48:00+00:00

My answer to My contract with web developer says a) she will create a unique description for each page, AND b) that she is not responsible for writing or inputting any content. Now she wants me to compose the page descriptions, citing (b). What do you think? Edit: this is re. the <meta> description tag. on Quora

You should write the copy. Copy is important - you don't want it to be written by someone who believes it isn't even their responsibility, and will hence probably do a poor job of it.

Tags: web-development, quora, web-developers

Are there any sites/services that you can subscribe to where you can watch a developer code "Live"?

2013-07-23T12:08:00+00:00

My answer to Are there any sites/services that you can subscribe to where you can watch a developer code "Live"? on Quora

The Ludum Dare game development contest sometimes has contestants that livestream - Notch (the creator of Minecraft) has done so in the past.

Tags: programmers, startups, quora, web-developers

Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design?

2013-07-20T14:09:00+00:00

My answer to Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design? on Quora

Yes: use percentage measurements for your layout components. That way you can build a website that works on a much larger range of screen sizes. You can combine this approach with media queries - for example, you could specify that your site has a 25% wide navigation menu and a 75% wide content area on devices that are wider than 400px, but any smaller than that and it collapses to a single column layout with the menu hidden and accessible only through a menu bar icon.

Tags: css, web-development, quora, frontend, web-developers, responsivedesign

How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed?

2012-10-20T17:14:00+00:00

My answer to How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed? on Quora

It is your fault. Part of being a good front-end engineer is knowing the ways in which a page might break and working with your team to mitigate them.

This involves a LOT of work: plenty of browser testing, asynchronous loading techniques so external script errors won't kill your site, load testing, monitoring, carefully balancing the trade-offs of things like CDNs or external font services...

Stuff will still break, and that's your fault for not thinking of everything - but you accept responsibility and take steps to prevent that particular problem from happening again. There should be no shame in making mistakes and learning from them - but seeking excuses rather than taking steps to prevent the problem from reoccurring is bad engineering.

Tags: quora, frontend, web-developers