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Notes from Front-end London March

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How to Win Designers and Influence Developers - Adam Rogers

  • Project Management
  • People don't always do what you tell them
  • To make great things, we have to work together and enjoy it!
    • Happier teams build better products
  • "You can delegate a task, but you can't delegate responsibility"
  • Recommend: How to win friends and influence people
  • When something goes wrong, don't criticise
    • just try to fix the problem
    • Work together to prevent it happening again
  • Say "Thank you" and mean it
  • Worry about what you can directly control
  • Communicate needs
  • Get feedback, talking is often the most productive way of solving problems
  • Asking questions
    • Helps avoid arguments
    • Saves face
    • Your team are smart. Use them!
  • Don't be a jerk!
  • Homework:
    • next time something goes horribly wrong, give credit instead of criticism
    • Help someone fix something, go through it with them
    • Ask someone a question

Exploring CSS3's 3D space - Daniel Grant

Check out the highly impressive demonstrations Daniel put together, including a CSS Solar System

  • The basics: transform
    • translate
    • rotate
  • Make things 3D-er by adding perspective (distance away)
  • To create a 3D shape, you have to combine lots of flat shapes on different planes
  • transform-style: preserve-3d to apply a transform to all children elements
  • backface-visibility: hidden to stop the back of a flipped object being shown
  • transition will show you the frames in between
  • Ooh, pretty thing is pretty!
  • Is 3D CSS useful? Yeah, but as a learning tool

Can code quality be measured? - Tim Ruffles

  • Sidekick.js a code quality tracker
  • Code quality: Who does it anger?
  • WTF is good code?
  • To extent it depends on us, "Is this my kind of code?"
  • Can we leave taste aside?
    • OOP or functional or procedural
  • What can we actually measure?
    • Doing the same thing three ways
    • I can't change anything
    • This looks like Java
    • It just works
  • Quality
    • Concise
      • DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
      • flay-js: structural duplication detection
      • Single Point Of Truth
    • Simple
      • KISS, but nobody tries to write complicated code
      • Does one thing, well
      • Low detail, attempt to abstract everything
      • As few responsibilities as possible
      • Low difficulty
        • Measuring local difficulty, how many paths through your code?
        • How many variables, how many things do you have to keep in your head at once?
      • Few dependencies
        • The more interconnected the code, the harder it is to change
      • Having a module system != Modularity
    • Readable
      • Avoid idioms and bringing other languages with you
      • Good naming. Make it longer the more it's going to be around
      • Variables and function names are better than bad comments
      • Comment, when the intention isn't clear from the code
      • Comments != documentation
      • Doctest.is, unit tests from documentation
    • Extendable / Changeable
      • Try and keep things small
    • Testable
      • Test 0 - can you actually test your code?
      • Code that isn't testable, generally isn't quality code
    • Does measured = managed? Yes, so long as you use it responsibly
    • Good conversation starter
    • Nice wall-o-metrics
    • Stay proud of your team's code