Yeah, not really.

As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, I suck at design. I can appreciate good application design, or at least I have an opinion on what makes a good design in my own head, for my own purposes, but that’s only knowing it when I see it. I can’t really make a good design to save my life, which is why I’m thankful my life doesn’t really rely on my design skills.

Still, as a web app developer, I need to be able to get elements onto the screen, usable by people, and in a way that doesn’t look like absolute garbage. My CSS skills are rudimentary at best which, considering I’ve been doing this job for almost 30 years now, is a confession. I’ve always explained it away by saying that my concern is to make things work and I got started in this business at a company where we had a dedicated designer. He’d design the design, and I’d make the parts work. It wasn’t until I switched jobs that I had to become the fullest of stack developers. Thankfully my job doesn’t pay me for my layout skills.

Earlier in the year I wrote that I was swearing off personal app projects this year, and for the most part I have stuck to that, though I did re-re-re-restart my ongoing Deno API/WS server project for some reason. That aside, I started watching videos from CSS master Kevin Powell, and his skill and enthusiasm for CSS made me sit down and start reading about the technology from the beginning.

As with most everything I sit down to learn, and as I have written about in a recent post, I have a definite trajectory. At first I am skeptical about ever making progress because the subject is too daunting; I always feel like I’m starting a race that’s half-way finished by the time I show up. But I make a go of it anyway, figuring that some knowledge is better than none. If I’m lucky, I find someone like Powell who can explain things in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m starting a race that half-way finished by the time I show up. Over time, then, I realize that I now know more than I did when I started. Things that looked weird start to make sense. I can deduce the next step before the information leads me there, and so on. This is actually the dangerous part, because I have a tendency to believe that I know enough of the basics to start jumping around, so I might skip useful intermediate information in favor of learning the “cool stuff”. When I do this I end up knowing just enough to start doing what I want to do, but never enough to do it well or correctly. After 30 years I am a good developer but I am not at all a great developer because of this M.O.

Studying CSS has lead to a weird side-effect: reviewing bare-metal HTML. I saw a video recently talking about web components and the “shadow DOM” and I saw HTML being used in ways I didn’t know it could be used, so I got curious and started reading the man pages on individual elements like textboxes, buttons, and other HTML 101 elements. While I am gaining a new-found appreciation for the craft, I’m not sure I’m retaining anything I’m reading here, but I hope than when I need it I’ll at least recall that I read something interesting about it once, and set off to refresh my memory. That’s one of the downsides to getting older, I guess.