The Front End Engineering Spectrum- The Three Generic Types of Front End Engineers

Posted on by Rob Larsen

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.
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Using CSS zoom and CSS Transforms For a Better “Increase Text Size” Button

Posted on by Rob Larsen

So… the site I’m working on has one of those “increase text size” controls. On this project it’s turned out to be one of those features that shows up in comps and somehow falls through the cracks until later on in the project cycle. Situation normal, really, as it isn’t a big feature. It’s just one of those things that needs to be buttoned up before the site can go live.

Anyway, I was thinking about how to do implement it the other day. I haven’t done one of these in a long time and the only other time I did one it involved crafting separate, albeit small, style sheets for the larger text sizes. I didn’t want to go that way again. Basically, I just didn’t want to write new style sheets- even small ones.

What’s a fella to do?

zoom

So, thinking about it a little bit, I seized upon using the non-standard CSS zoom property. Supported in Internet Explorer (zoom:1 is often used for a hasLayout toggle) and Webkit browsers, it would represent a simple (1 line!) CSS solution to this problem. It’s also one that I like better aesthetically as the site looks the same, just bigger. I figure there’s a reason all browsers have moved to this behavior when hitting ctrl+.

The problem was figuring out an equivalent for FireFox and Opera which don’t support zoom

Enter CSS 2D Transform

A little searching and experimenting later I came up with the idea of using CSS Transforms and the scale value to approximate zoom in browsers that lack support.

Let’s see how I did it.

As you go through the following keep in mind this hasn’t actually gone through testing yet so something weird could yet shake out. I just wrote this code yesterday, so you guys can be my sanity check.

Also, is anyone else doing this?

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A New Site I Worked On is Live (officially)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

We finally launched the new Isobar North America site. It had been in a soft-launch phase for several weeks as we worked out the kinks. Now it’s official.

I worked on it and, amazingly enough for an internal project I’m happy with it.
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More On Interviewing Front End Engineers- If You Ask About Something, Really KNOW It (With an Example Based on the W3C Box Model)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I’m going to be writing a bit more about practical development topics here over the next few weeks. Code is fun to write about but code takes time. Sharing my experience and opinions on the day-to-day life of a front end engineer I can do with a little less effort. Also, since I’ve been doing it forever and have experience all over the place I feel like I just might have something to share.

Anyway, today I’m going to continue to talk about the technical interview process. This time with an anecdote culled from my time on the other side of the desk.

I was interviewed a while ago by someone who was significantly junior to me. I think he had maybe 3 years of experience. I was supposed to have been interviewed by someone who would have been a peer at the company, but that fell apart and it fell down to a junior resource. He asked me two questions over a span of ten minutes. Both were worth commenting on, but I’m going to focus on the first one as it illustrates something pretty important about who you have interviewing people and what they should be expected to be able to figure out about a candidate.

We get on the phone, trade pleasantries and then he gets started. He asks me the following question:

“You have a div with a width of 300 pixels. It’s got a margin of 10 pixels. How big is the box?”
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