What’s the most important thing to know as a developer?
If you already know me. You are probably aware that I waste precious time and money making pointless worthless sites.
Examples of such waste of spaces (within the last few months):
http://isthissitebuiltwithhtml5.com
http://obamasmessagetoamerica.com
Why do I do this? Simple, I enjoy it. And I learn things / teach things. Sometimes, other people enjoy them :)
Take instac.at for example. I used the instagram API for the first time, and I learnt css transitions. It was the first time I used css transitions instead of js effects. It took me 4 hours to make, not really that much time in the grand scheme of things. So far to this day it has provided over 240 hours of “entertainment” to over 15000 people.
Obama’s message to America was the first time I hooked into html5 audio for timings. Listening out for the timeupdate event. I also used more css transitions on here.
Some people in the past have said “You have too much time on your hands”, I disagree, I make time for learning & teaching you things :)
Yes, I could just run through a tutorial, create exactly what they have told me to do. Or even watch a screencast of someone walking me through how to do something. Personally, I come up with a new simple idea and make it forcing myself to try something new.
Recently, one of my students asked me what was the most important to know as a developer, whatever development you do. In my opinion the most important thing to know, is that you will always need to be learning.
As a web developer, the web as we know it was not here 10 years ago. YouTube was only founded just over 6 years ago. What will the web be like in 10 years time? Not a clue. But I will still be wanting a job! So I need to adapt constantly as new technologies emerge.
In my opinion that is the beauty of it all. Learning new cool stuff to play with all the time.
What do you think is the most important thing to know as a developer? Reply in a blog post and let me know via twitter (@sydlawrence).
#1thingtoknow
Update: Right after writing this blog post, I created http://isittherapture.com. To make this site I used the new HTML5 Canvas tag. I used 2 rendering techniques to populate to canvas tags. One used the drawing technique. The other used the pixel maniuplation technique. And for those interested, in 24 hours this site saw almost 3000 unique visitors, over 100 facebook likes, and almost 100 tweets.
