Book review: Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

My own thoughts…

As a person diving back into the web world, I found this book an incredibly helpful and invigorating read. The examples in the book are intuitive, easily conveyed, and reinforced; but they do require some prior knowledge of HTML/CSS.  From a technical perspective, Ethan focuses on 2 main ideas: relative/flexible sizing of a page’s physical layout and media queries to define different behaviors within different (width specific) contexts.  When I finished the book, I was excited not only at the prospect of rereading it, but also about reading many of the articles he references and to hack on my own learning projects for some hands on experience.  I cannot remember the last time I read a programming book with that much interest.

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The other day, I stumbled across this blog post on twitter: “Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer“.  It starts with the following:

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.

then launches into a number of examples.  I think the most notable pieces of advice were the following: “Don’t call yourself a programmer” (define yourself in terms of your accomplishments, not your tech skills), “Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets” (awareness and good-will does one wonders), and “Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait“.  I found most of his points refreshingly articulating things I have come to over the past six years – but lately, I have found myself working on these three more than others.

I highly recommend reading this article.