(Thank you Sarah for the comment that inspired this post.)
So, in the sense of standing up Linux and Apache and being our own MySQL DBAs, we are not really full stack developers.
Back end, front end, yes. We do that stuff, sure.
And then we fill in the gaps.
Continue reading “Our stack is full; our stack runneth over”
this past week i’ve been doing a lot of work either creating wireframes or in support of wireframe creation. wireframing is the fastest way i know to work out a thorny interaction design or layout problem.
we had hoped our designer would be able to take on the wireframing tasks but it appears that isn’t happening. it’s unfortunate but in reality we are so much closer to the content and the overall structure of the site that it was probably unrealistic to expect someone outside of the development team to be able to identify and solve the design problems that we have.
as an “armchair wordcamper” i’m aware that the WP REST API is packing rooms whenever it’s the topic of a talk. wordpress developers are excited by the possibility of interacting with wordpress via a REST-ful API that uses JSON as its transport format.
last summer, while our grand wordpress vision was still just being discussed, i participated in a (unrelated) group exercise that brought together a handful of devs from across our division to evaluate various javascript frameworks such as react.js, ember.js, and angular. in the end, we recommended angular as the framework to use in new application development where a REST-ful API was either being built or already available.
why?
true confession: i hate the phrase “watching sausage being made” when it refers to a process that is messy and perhaps a bit ugly, but has a happy result. unless that process actually has the result of delicious sausage that you can eat, in which case i fully support that phrase. i just don’t like it as a business metaphor.
it is, nevertheless, the most apt way i can think of to describe what is happening right now on our intranet project. we are having intense and wonderful debates on exactly how we will do this and that. not technical stuff. more wibbly-wobbly stuff.
what they used to say was ‘lisa, would you make it pretty?’
we all knew that there was more to it than that. ‘pretty’ was pretty inadequate. they appreciated what i could do, even if it didn’t have the cred of coding. i preached user centered design, usability, stuff we didn’t have words for. i interviewed their users and found out what they really needed (until the project managers made me stop talking directly to the users).