CSS is one of my favorite languages. And the only way I can consider CSS to be difficult is if you have no experience with HTML. If you try to do HTML by hand, then doing CSS by hand on top of HTML by hand is really easy and wonderful. And this is truly where you gain the fundamental framework for "getting CSS".
I learned to take it personally but not react badly. This way I am not trying to counter a normal human experience, but instead changing something I have total control over, my response.
This is a fight worth having because the more you do it, the better you get at it and you feel less and less attacked you feel when criticism comes your way.
The first few times doing this are the hardest. But after doing this for some time, I rarely feel criticisms are personal anymore. This also affected how people talk to me, and they make it less personal. It's an odd combination of success from both sides.
A key point to all of this, was I needed to make my criticisms less personal.
A manager told me a key point in a private conversation once that help me change my attitude.
He said "I don't like talking about people, I like talking about processes".
I had just been critical of a "person" in the conversation, and I realized how much easier it was to talk about a "process" with my criticism after I took his hint to heart. And others took some time to follow my lead on this, and for me to be consistent about this change of process.
I could certainly put you in touch with my friend. What I meant by "offline" is that I really don't want to put my email address into a public forum to be spammed. Any suggestions how to share contact info?
I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids.
I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)
What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.
Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...
I recommend just starting from scratch. As a programmer at heart I find programming like playing with Legos. While I needed to understand how all the underlying parts worked, I didn't need instructions on how to build a specific larger thing.
I found MDN to indispensible in learning to make web apps. Everything from learning the basics of string/array/date/etc... objects, to modern ES6 modules.
As far as actually building apps? After 20+ years of programming, I found my own light weight JS code turned into a framework over time for building apps the way I wanted to. Mostly vanilla JS.
But it didn't stay vanilla JS because too many things are hard on your own. Since everything you build you have to maintain, I found it easier to use jQuery years ago with all it's extra tools. Today? I am still removing jQuery from my code, as vanilla JS does everything jQuery did for me. (I stopped using their widgets as soon as browsers supported features by default, like a proper date picker, etc...)
So, my advice, start from scratch. learn all the pieces one at a time as you need them. This will keep you from getting overwhelmed.
Are their good resources for these from scratch online? Sure, but maybe a book is a good idea here, as it forces a more basic linear learning process if you start at the beginning. Not sure I'd take this route, but it may work for some people.
To your original question - no, I don't know of single source. But no, you do not need Node. You can create an html file and load it directly in a browser, you don't need a server to get started. But this is just step one...
I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road)
My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance.
At one time if you even _looked up_ the availability of a domain name they would immediately register it so if you tried to then register it at Namecheap or GoDaddy the name was taken already.
That should be illegal. (I have not bothered testing if their system still does this)
To be clear, I agree with your assessment and I would not recommend an agency unless you are a huge company as well. It's a mis-match of interests and goals.
The work I did as a web programmer for an agency (freelance) was similarly imbalanced with many "leaders" telling me what to do, (ie, project lead heavy, 1 designer, 1 programmer) and it was a mess and I won't bother with it again.
You said you'd next time go with a freelancer as one of your solutions. I'd argue you can run into the exact same problems as you described in your main post, just on a smaller scale.
In this comment:
> There were still issues, but I was prepared this time. WebAgency kept suggesting new flourishes to the design. I declined them all and told them to focus on the design I’d approved. I’m glad I did because they’d probably still be working on the website today.
I think you need to do this with every project reguardless of the size of the team you are working with.
Design companies seem to want to make customers feel like they are unskilled / unable to make design decisions for themselves, but maybe this is all experts? And I can say I have had very stubborn customers in the past, and it was good for everyone involved to have a customer that knows what they want and expects it, even if the designer doesn't really like the results as much as their own ideas.
While I agree with your list, it's not _always_ going to be 90/10. Day to day work is the opposite, 10/90, especially if you have a lot of production to get done. (then it can be 100% fun for stretches of time)
It's the feast or famine issue. When you don't have enough work, you are required to do sales to stay in business.
Do enough sales, and have enough repeat work, and you may find you have no time for sales, and may not want any more customers. It all depends on your customer base and the type of work you do.
Also, I loved repeat/consistent work from known customers because the documentation and paperwork burden plummets dramatically. Sometimes to nothing more than a phone call/email to start work, and invoice when it's done.
I think you are agreeing with the article, but the details are different. I like how he distinguishes between specific use case, user generated content, or part of the site design.
> So, which method should we use?
> We've got one solution, aspect-ratio, which is CSS-based. And the other solution, presentational hinting, which uses width and height attributes. The question is very similar to "should this image be a <img> or a CSS background-image?" and the answer is the same: Is it content or design?
Focusing on other people will take your focus off yourself.
I have found satisfaction in helping others. The less personal time I have, the more I value it and the more satisfying life generally is. Also, this is very likely temporary, as your kids get older your life will change with them. They will have more and more adult and complicated life needs.
I found that forcing myself to do things differently based on other people's advice (especially when I didn't feel like it) often brought extremely unexpected results. But there is a massive inertia with changing who you are and the day to day choices you make.
That's kind of you, I appreciate that. I think I am going to redo some things to target the market it serves better and maybe I will post a "Show HN" here.
A key premise is that the designer decides where things go, and the content editors really just want forms to fill out to get content where the designer says it should go. But like any system, there is full WYSIWYG editable regions as well. (where the pink blinky text will show up...)
I've not marketed Archetype widely (but I went through Startup School a few times with YC) because of the same reasons every other developer has, Archetype has warts.
CSS is one of my favorite languages. And the only way I can consider CSS to be difficult is if you have no experience with HTML. If you try to do HTML by hand, then doing CSS by hand on top of HTML by hand is really easy and wonderful. And this is truly where you gain the fundamental framework for "getting CSS".