custard doughnuts

I've worked on a lot of websites and seen a lot of front end code. Some good, some bad. Some... really bad.

More often than I'd like, I encounter the same patterns of badness. Here's a few examples of the kind of things that some front end developers do that drive me to despair. Warning: this is going to get technical.

Right, enough games and code and experiments. Time for some good ol' fashioned web development rambling.

I've had to do a lot of web browsing recently outside of my normal areas of web usage. A lot of the sites I've found have implemented some commonly used website features that I think would benefit from a bit of closer scrutiny. If you're thinking of getting a website built for you, or are just interested in user experience stuff, read on.

It's not easy being a backend developer. Not only do you have to code massive websites, you also end up being responsible for maintaining things like build scripts and database migrations, and being called on every five minutes to fix the dev system of the front end developer working on your project, who probably caused their problem in the first place. On top of that, you often have to wait for that same front end developer to get on and give you some front end before you can properly check that your website is working correctly.

As a front end developer, I genuinely sympathise, so here's my thoughts on the best way to work on front end when the front end isn't ready yet.

Whenever I get asked to work on an existing website I haven't worked on before I tend to find a lot of CSS classes on elements that on first glance don't appear to do anything. As a naturally tidy person, this irks me. Why are they there? Is there some element much further down in the DOM that relies upon that class, or is there some bit of JavaScript somewhere that acts on it? Or is it simply an unused class that can be safely removed?

A quick search through the CSS and JS should answer this question pretty quickly, unless the class in question is a generic word, like 'select' or 'option'. Believe it or not, this happens more often than you'd think.

This isn't a huge problem, it's a small pain that adds a few extra minutes here and there. I'm just tired of it. I'd like to propose the following convention to remove this problem entirely.

We run a lot of projects at work and increasingly over the last few years we've been using LESS to create the CSS on them. While this is great for us front end developers, it has thrown up a surprising problem for those who are responsible for actioning pull requests through git. Here's some thoughts on a very specific problem.