It’s a great time to be a web developer. After a long period of hibernation, the standards bodies and browser vendors have been extremely busy over the past few years, generating a torrent of exciting technology. Developers are greedily seizing on this work, producing demos and full-blown applications at a steady pace. Fed by this activity and further boosted by the growth of their standards-capable mobile browsers, companies like Google and Apple are using these new standards to market their products and services. The wider press is also seizing on this wave and pushing standards hype well beyond the normal circle of web developers and browser vendors.
This volume of discussion has obvious benefits, of course. People getting excited about web standards is a positive development for everyone in the industry. From that perspective, the persistent use of blanket terms, especially HTML5, as a sort of brand shorthand for “emerging web technology” is a useful shortcut. It allows nontechnical people to grasp—in a generalized way—the exciting work being done in the standards space right now.
Interestingly, even the W3C has gotten into the act, using HTML5 and its associated logo (see Figure 1) to publicize the “web platform.”
The short answer is- I don’t pay all that much attention to the sites listed on a candidate’s resume.
Don’t get me wrong, I look at sites and I prefer to see at least three or four examples when doing an evaluation. It’s just that I’m looking at sites mostly to exclude people. We see a lot of unqualified candidates at the resume level, so most of what we need to do at this point is to get rid of all the people who have no chance. Because of that, I’m visiting listed sites just to make sure the work looks professional and is done in a reasonably modern style. Basically I don’t want to see any tables, inline event handlers, or generated code and looking just a little deeper I want to make sure the JavaScript doesn’t look obviously insane. If they pass that test, then the real work of the hiring process begins. We’ll start the rest of the interview process in order to dig deeper into their front end knowledge and personality.
Why I Don’t Look at Source Code
I could view source and maybe learn a thing or two, but I’ve done this long enough to know how unreliable that can be for judging a candidate’s technical ability.
I’ve got some more content coming up on IBM over the next few months on some pretty exciting topics. I’m in the middle of a deadline for one right now, actually…
For starters, the following is what I’m generally interested in when doing an interview. It doesn’t represent in any official way what my current employer and my boss might be looking for in a candidate. It’s not my group, so this is only part of the picture.
Secondly, this is based on the “Front End Developer” role I outlined in my previous post. That’s what I do and what I’ve interviewed people for over the past few years, so if you’re looking for insights into interviewing for another role, adjust accordingly.
Also, and this should go without saying, the following is simply what I look for in a candidate. This is entirely personal and biased. If you look for other things or don’t care about some of the things that I value that’s cool. There are infinite ways to get to the same result here. We all want to hire good people. Read the rest of this entry »
Following up on my previous post about the generic types of front end engineers, this post will deal with the common roles that I see people trying to fill. Unlike the previous list which was written solely from the perspective of a front end engineer, looking at the actual skill sets of the people whose resumes I’ve reviewed, people I’ve interviewed and folks I’ve worked with; this list is based on job descriptions and roles designed by people may not really understand what being a front end engineer means in 2011. Hopefully a few of those people (and maybe a recruiter or two) will visit this site and come away with a better sense of how to staff these roles.
This came up in a comment here, so I thought I’d bubble this little tip to the top.
To target multiple files for URL rewriting in the HTML5 Boilerplate build script (as of version 0.95) use the fileset element instead of the file argument in the “html” target:
<target name="html" depends="">
<echo message="Clean up the html..."/>
<!-- style.css replacement handled as a replacetoken above -->
<replaceregexp match="<!-- scripts concatenated [\d\w\s\W]*?!-- end concatenated and minified scripts-->"
replace="<script src='${dir.js}/scripts-${build.number}.min.js\'></script>" flags="m">
<!-- grab everything html -->
<fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="**/*.html"/>
</replaceregexp>
<replaceregexp match="<!-- yui profiler[\d\w\s\W]*?end profiling code -->" replace=" " flags="m">
<!-- grab everything html -->
<fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="**/*.html"/>
</replaceregexp>
<!--[! use comments like this one to avoid having them get minified -->
</target>
You then need to expand the fileset element in the next three targets (htmlbuildkit, htmlclean, htmlcompress) to include subfolders.
As both a hiring manager and as a potential employee, I’ve seen both sides of the interview/hiring process and have noticed some definite categories when it comes to the type of people filling the roles and the roles themselves. This post deals with the types of people. I’ll follow up with a post outlining the types of roles and who (of the following) you should be looking hire if you’re looking to fill one of those specific roles.
The Three Types of Front End Engineers
Clearly, there are people that fall somewhere in between these broad categories. Still, I think these are pretty solid as general buckets. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a big fan of the Graded Browser Support table from the fine folks at Yahoo! It was the official foundation for our browser support policy at Cramer and I still look to it now for hints into what one of the most mass-market of all sites thinks about the browser landscape. Read the rest of this entry »
The latest version of HTML5 Boilerplate was released and the build script I worked on is included as a beta feature. I’m happy to see it in the wild even though it reminds me that I’ve got a couple of outstanding enhancements I want to take care of at some point (soon? *fingers crossed*)
Anyway, check it out and definitely take the build script for a spin. Know Ant and want to help out? Want to port it to another build system (that would be awesome)? Dive in. We’re happy for the help.
Let’s face it. Marketing in the digital age is hard. Where will you put your efforts? How do you know it will pay off? The Isobar 50 is our list of the top 50 challenges that online marketers are grappling with today, and our recommendations for dealing with them. If you’re an online marketer, this is the place to get answers to your most pressing marketing and online business questions.
I provided answers for three of the questions and I even sound like I know what I’m talking about: Read the rest of this entry »