MakerSquare Day 33: Front- and Back-End (7/5)

When I started at MakerSquare, my sister asked if I could make her a website. At that point, we were deep into Ruby, which is not really (at all) what you would want to build a website in.

(Though, to complicate issues, there's lots of Ruby-ish qualities to tools that'll help you build a website, like Jekyll (for generating static websites) and Liquid (a template language that seems a little bit like code) and Sass/Scss (for styling your pages). So, yeah.)

But now, this week we spent two days playing around with HTML and CSS and...

...And I realized I never talked about the front-end/back-end division, which I've mentioned a few times. Is it clear what I mean when I say that? What if I said "full-stack"? (Don't worry, I won't say "full-stack," at least not in reference to my skill-set.)

The general division between front- and back-end is, uh, basically in the name. If you need an analogy, think of the front-end as the client-facing side of just about anything: the salesclerk helping a customer find the right size suit/dress is working front-end. The guy in the back, unloading pallets of clothes and organizing the employees-only room in back? He's doing back-end work.

Or, in honor of my librarian girlfriend teaching me about libraries: the librarian who helps you find a book and checks it out for you is only one small part of the library. In the back rooms, doing the back-end work, there are a lot of librarians doing the cataloguing and dealing with the rarer customer requests (like interlibrary loans).

In web development, that division of labor (or separation of concerns) comes out in the separation of back-end logic (how we store data and how we do a lot of work on that data) and front-end presentation (which is how the website is presented to the user and how it responds to that user). There's some overlap--even when I worked as a stockboy at a health-food store, I sometimes helped out customers find the right vitamins for their terrible ailments--but that's the general division between web developers.

So in a few weeks, after working on my sister's website, I'll probably be able to tell you if I like this far front-end work.

MakerSquare Day 32: Stump the Expert and Startup Crawl (7/4)

In his early work, George Carlin has a bit about how kids at his school would get to ask their priest really arcane questions, questions where they would add caveats and issues to try to stump the priest, questions like

"Father, what if you haven't done your Easter duty and it's the last day of Pentecost, and you're on a ship at sea and the chaplain goes into a coma, but you wanted to receive, but now it's Monday and it's too late--but then you cross the international date line..."

And there's a little bit of that when our HTML/CSS expert comes in. Which might be a good signal about how... mysterious HTML/CSS can seem. Like religion (oh boy, watch me step carefully here), there are some things about HTML/CSS that are relatively straightforward. Like: When you create a section (using a <div> tag), the div can be a block (and so take up the full width of the page) or be inline (and so only take up a certain amount of horizontal space) or be an inline-block (and so mix the two presentation-styles).

Actually, now that I think of it, block, inline, and inline-block aren't all that clear.

But there's a lot of info on those differences online and it all sort of makes sense. When you get to some other tags and options, this stuff gets arcane quickly. (Which might serve as a good tagline for MakerSquare: "Get Arcane--Quickly.") So when our HTML/CSS expert comes in, we often have a show-and-tell/stump-the-priest attitude.

"What if you want the text to be 3D and come out to the reader, but not too 3D? What if you want to make an entire section clickable as a link, without wrapping the whole section in a link tag? What if..."

Unlike religion (oh, careful, careful), once you see the answers, most of them don't turn out to be all that arcane. (Or, well, it's been a long time since I was in Hebrew school, but my memory of it is that all the stuff that seems arcane, really is arcane.) It's mostly a question of learning the right words and suddenly you can make 3D text that's actually behind a div container and make that container spin when hovered over.

This evening, MakerSquare--and some other offices--were taken over by the Startup Crawl part of Austin Startup Week, which involved a fair bit of parties and talking to people about their tech stacks. It was interesting to go from "how to present a website" to "how to present yourself as a human being, oh god, talk about something fun like George Carlin."

Overall, it was a good time and I did talk to a lot of interesting people at interesting companies who, though they didn't know it, were assigning me homework every time they talked about something I haven't yet mastered.