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Freelancing
Take the Pedals Off Your Bicycle and Become a Better Web Developer
By Louis Lazaris on September 27th, 2009
Categories: Freelancing, Web Design Articles | 10 Comments >
Over the weekend, my wife and I had the privilege of taking care of two of our friends’ children, while their parents had a night out at a local show. When the kids’ mom was showing us a few things around their apartment, we noticed that their daughter’s bicycle had no pedals on it. That was a little peculiar, so we inquired about it.
Her mother said she wanted her daughter (who is about 5 years old) to have her feet on the ground as she learned to ride her bicycle. This would allow her to remove her feet from the ground only for short amounts of time, thus practicing her balance without pedals or training wheels. In this way, she could focus purely on balancing herself, and not worry about trying to do more than one thing at a time.
I’m not really sure where her mom got this idea from, or even if it is any good for learning to ride a bike, but it reminded me of what I personally prefer when it comes to learning new skills in web design or development.
10 “Nice-To-Have” Skills for Front-End Developers
By Louis Lazaris on May 10th, 2009
Categories: Freelancing, Web Design Articles | 16 Comments >
As of Monday I will be officially out of work and looking for a new job, most likely in the same field — front-end web development. I’ve been reviewing the job ads for the past few weeks and it’s nice to see that a lot of companies are catching on to the fact that web developers work best when they specialize in certain areas. In this way, a developer can be a significant part of an effective web development team.
Front-end developers generally specialize in clean, standards-compliant, accessible XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and, more often than not, graphic design. But since front-end coders are a dime-a-dozen these days, it pays to have experience, or, at least, rudimentary knowledge, in a number of other technologies that often don’t get listed under “mandatory” skills for a front-end position.
In this article I’ll briefly outline, in no particular order, 10 “nice-to-have” skills that will greatly enhance the resume or portfolio of today’s front-end web developer.
