I think I see what you mean. Many a very competent backend dev (and many more a kid in their bedroom with zero programming experience) has thought to themselves “how hard can webdev possibly be?” and blindly stumbled through making a website that looks fine on their machine without bothering to understand what the various CSS units do and turning it into an utter monstrosity if you even slightly change the size of the browser window, and the web suffers for it.
As a primarily backend dev myself who’s tried my hand at web once or twice, I still think that web developers are by far the most pampered in the industry when it comes to development tools (I can change CSS parameters with sliders right in my browser, see the page update in real time, and when I’m done I can just export the modified .css file to disk and upload it directly to my server with zero touchup to make my changes live? Are you KIDDING ME?) but I also think it’s important to treat the practice with the respect it deserves. By that I mean taking the time to learn the languages, read through MDN’s excellent documentation, and take the time to fully understand what each CSS parameter actually does instead of trial-and-erroring your way into something that only works for you. The same thing you’d do if you were learning any new programming language. Once you do that, apart from a few hiccups due to browser inconsistencies (any time Safari would like to stop eating glue I’d appreciate it) and having to come up with something that looks good in portrait, and get past a metric f**k ton of googling and memorizing the minute differences between dozens of very similar parameters, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had as a programmer. I love being able to just go “I want a bunch of circles at the top of my page that bounce up and down in sequence.” “Sure, give me two minutes.” I’d stress about that for days in any other environment. Why didn’t anyone tell me it could BE like this?
I think I see what you mean. Many a very competent backend dev (and many more a kid in their bedroom with zero programming experience) has thought to themselves “how hard can webdev possibly be?” and blindly stumbled through making a website that looks fine on their machine without bothering to understand what the various CSS units do and turning it into an utter monstrosity if you even slightly change the size of the browser window, and the web suffers for it.
As a primarily backend dev myself who’s tried my hand at web once or twice, I still think that web developers are by far the most pampered in the industry when it comes to development tools (I can change CSS parameters with sliders right in my browser, see the page update in real time, and when I’m done I can just export the modified .css file to disk and upload it directly to my server with zero touchup to make my changes live? Are you KIDDING ME?) but I also think it’s important to treat the practice with the respect it deserves. By that I mean taking the time to learn the languages, read through MDN’s excellent documentation, and take the time to fully understand what each CSS parameter actually does instead of trial-and-erroring your way into something that only works for you. The same thing you’d do if you were learning any new programming language. Once you do that, apart from a few hiccups due to browser inconsistencies (any time Safari would like to stop eating glue I’d appreciate it) and having to come up with something that looks good in portrait, and get past a metric f**k ton of googling and memorizing the minute differences between dozens of very similar parameters, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had as a programmer. I love being able to just go “I want a bunch of circles at the top of my page that bounce up and down in sequence.” “Sure, give me two minutes.” I’d stress about that for days in any other environment. Why didn’t anyone tell me it could BE like this?