I see that I have insulted you and for that I am sorry. I doubt that there is much I can say in this medium to undo that damage other than to tell you that it was unintentional.
I really don't see the word "labor" as a slur but I do agree that I didn't use it in the strictest sense. To me, the word "laborer" equates to something like: "someone who is instructed by their employer what to do."
I don't begrudge or judge anyone who is comfortable with such an arrangement. If my words contained a tone of disdain, it's because I've absorbed the frustrations of literally hundreds of people who are not comfortable with such an arrangement.
My book is for folks - usually experts in their field - who are sick of their employers telling them what to do. Sick of being micromanaged, second-guessed, and generally disrespected by clients who have nothing but a checkbook and an opinion.
My impression from your previous comment is that you do not fall into this category, and therefore, my book would be useless to you. In retrospect, I do understand why you took offense and again I apologize for that.
Hi! Author here. Thanks for your comment :) I was preparing to answer your questions and then I read that you consider yourself a laborer. If you see yourself as a laboror, my book is definitely not for you. If at some point in the future you start to feel like you've maxed out your annual income and don't know what to do about it, you might want to revisit the idea of ditching hourly billing. Cheers! —J
Having personally worked on responsive redesigns for ew.com, techcrunch.com, and timeinc.com, I know as well as anyone that designing a full scale responsive site can be hard. Really hard.
That said, the hard parts are not the technology or the implementation. Rather, the hard parts are organizational dysfunction, legacy CMS software, integration with non-responsive 3rd party services like ad networks, and so on.
The complete lack of those sorts of challenges in something like a hackathon means that devs are free to design in a way that maybe they can't do at work or for clients. My shock was that given such freedom, they choose to basically ignore mobile.
> But what people want at these events is a catchy, flashy demo that wows attendees and that can be tweeted/Facebooked/etc.
And then what? Opened on a mobile phone where the demo doesn't work? Mobile is where people are reading facebook/twitter so if you want to optimize for catchy/flashy for sharing in social media, you should definitely focus on mobile-first.
It doesn't have to be hard. Some visual designs can be hard to do cross device but that's conscious design choice. The implementation is not that hard if you start small and work your way up.
What I said in the article was that most devs should have had time to do both, BUT if they really had to pick one, pick mobile. I'm not saying ignore desktop - I'm saying it's the #2 priority.
Good point about "the screensize they would demo" but in the case of Rails Rumble, the contestants don't demo their work. The judges browse through them on their own on whatever device they like.
Yes, there are certain work products (code, for example) that still can only reasonably be done on desktop/laptop computers. But the list of work products that require a desktop/laptop are dwindling, not growing.
Printers are a good analogy. Look around most any office and note that the number of printers has drastically decreased. This is a sign of work products changing - i.e., people don't need to print out as much stuff on paper to get our jobs done. The same is happening with desktop/laptops now. It's industry specific currently but the trend is clear.
Hi! I'm the post author. Desktop is dead in the way TV and newspapers are dead. Yes, they're still around but there's no growth. They certainly shouldn't be the main focus for a web developer building a personal site from scratch.