Choose your battles

Slides from talk at the 2015 Shropgeek (R)evolution conference.
Exploring role of pragmatism in being technical director at a digital agency and what we can learn from the Spanish Civil War in dealing with an increasing complexity in working with code.

Transcript

1. choose your battles: tales from the front lines of a digital agency
3. you say you want a (r)evolution?
6. “the real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” @GeorgeOrwell1984
7. libertarianism
8. dangers of authoritarianism
9. the web?
10. rules and choices
11. loose rules
12. confidence, trends & the dogmatic crowd
13. building websites
14. handlebars Gulp Yeoman Sass Bower Grunt Less-CSS EmberJS AngularJS underscore.js Backbone CoffeeScript.js Compass Bourbon npm CSS JavaScript HTML PostCSS Broccoli React Polymer RequireJS Jasmine Jasmine jQuery ZeptoJS Modernizr mustache Jade
15. “Looking at the stack listed in the front end tooling survey, I can safely say that as a junior developer, I’d probably be unemployable” @codepo8
16. “The more I see - the more I know. The more I know - the less I understand” @paulwellerHQ
17. CSS
18. <b style=""></b> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" /> @import url(style.css); @media screen and (min-width: 768px) …
19. CSS SMACSS ITCSS OOCSS BEM
20. who are we building for?
21. the myth of CSS
22. “People don’t care about things - they care about the things that happen” @russmiles
23. “That I cannot say sir. I am one of these people who are quite happy to wear cotton, but have no idea how it works.” @edmund_blackadder
24. the ‘p’ word
25. principles and purposes help make choices
26. • URLs are constant • anticipate a range of inputs • expect JavaScript to fail my principles
27. “the code is more what you'd call ‘guidelines' than actual rules.” @cptn_barbossa
28. “the real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” @GeorgeOrwell1984