17 February, 2011 | Filed under “The Archives”
Alex Walker, Editor of SitePoint Design View, echoed my thoughts exactly in the 80th issue of his newsletter. Asking the question “What does it mean to be a web developer in 2011?” he dives in and answers himself:
“A decade ago, it meant you did almost everything, from quick-fire pencil sketches, through to Photoshop mockups, to working front-end code. If you had a dedicated back-end guy, you were considered a crack dev team.
In 2011, web development is a very different beast, and few of us try to cover it all. We’ve become UI designers, JavaScript gurus, SEO wizards, usability experts, information architects, copywriters, editors, database guns, and project managers. You might say none of us are web developers, but we all are.”
It is always a relief to find like-minded souls. We can gang up, halt all progress and oppose change, but, shit, Alex is a positive guy, ending his editorial with an:
“Exciting times ahead.”
I let Silverlight pass me by only to have it come back and haunt me on a recent project. I do not know Ruby on Rails from the Trans-Siberian Railway. It took jQuery to carry me back to JavaScript, only to find MooTools, Prototype, and script.aculo.us laughing at me from the corners of the DOM.
Being the lone wolf was one reason for freelancing in the first place. The freedom to work from home, the quiet hours of the night when ActionScript flows naturally. But it is impossible to stay on top of it all and a challenge to focus on the necessary, practical and useful stuff. Join a team? Sure. Any day, should they want a jack of all trades and master of none.
This may sound lamenting, and it is, of course. But, listen, I am excused. I handle the bodhrán and sing in this group of enthusiasts playing traditional Celtic-Irish-Scottish-English-Canadian folk music and we carry a Buffy Sainte-Marie song on our repertoire, Old man’s lament. The story told in the song is a far cry from web design and web development but it has inspired me to come up with this new word, “develament”. Not bad, eh?
Got to go. Another weekend lost to Joomla!. Exciting times ahead.