Hope to see you there (and then at Trade afterwards.)

The two posts on the subject are:

The Front End Engineering Spectrum- The Three Generic Types of Front End Engineers
and
The Front End Engineering Spectrum: The Roles

Check them out, I think they’re pretty cool.

These posts have resurfaced a couple of times recently and in reviewing them I thought it would be interesting to see where people’s experience plots against those roles.

To that end, I made a quick poll.

If you’re the “front end” guy or gal at your job, please fill it out. It will only take a minute

Check back here May 20th when I’ll share the results. The poll will close next Thursday, May 16th at 11:59 Eastern time.

Fill it out below, or if the form isn’t loading, at this link.

Also, please share it far and wide!

Visual Studio 2012

As I mentioned, I’m going to try to avoid a lot of repetition of Rey’s options in this post (which is why you won’t see Sublime Text mentioned, even though it’s #3 in my code editor triumvirate.) Still, I feel like I have to add in my two cents on VS2012. One of the weird things about the web developer community is that, as a whole, we recognize that the tools we have aren’t as good as they should be. Some of this stuff is hard to do right or do efficiently and doing both is often the domain of the real experts. Then, in the very next breath, some folks will pile onto Microsoft and Adobe with as much vitriol as they can manage. The thing is, and this is something you pick up pretty quickly when you start to work with XAML, Silverlight and Flex refugees on the open web stack, Adobe and Microsoft created pretty sweet tools and APIs. People could get their jobs done. No, they weren’t perfect but their developers felt empowered. It’s surprising that they stick around at all, after they see what our ragtag band has to offer.

VS2012 is one of those tools. Yes, it costs money. Yes, it only runs on Windows. Yes, it’s a multi-GB install. No, it has no street cred. All that said, even out of the box it’s a powerful editor for web tech and, if you take the time to configure it properly it’s ridiculous.

I’ve been using this more and more recently.

Adobe Dreamweaver

This isn’t necessarily a Windows-only thing, of course. But still, it’s worth pointing out as Dreamweaver gets a bad rap.

Yes, it’s a WYSIWYG editor that people have made awful things with for 15 years and people disparage “Dreamweaver developers” as people who don’t know how to hand-code anything.

The thing is, while it can be those things, it’s also pretty great. From the beginning (FWIW, the first version I used, 1.2, came out in 1998), Dreamweaver has embraced and understood JavaScript in ways that other editors only started to recently. Dreamweaver extensions are written in JS so JavaScript isn’t some add-on, it’s core to the product. It’s also the heir of HomeSite, the great web-centric text editor that was my bread and butter for nearly the entire 2000s.

While it’s still got WYSIWYG features aplenty, it’s a fine, configurable editor with great code hinting, excellent site management tools and plenty of opportunities for automation. Mixed with Adobe Fireworks, you can smoothly move between graphics files and your web editor for even more webtastic power. My go-to editor at home where I’m running CS6.

I love being able to open an HTML document and having the full context of the attached files available when I’m editing. You always remain in the context of the HTML page, even when you’re switching back and forth between the attached JavaScript and CSS files.

TextPad

My utility text editor. If I need to open and manipulate a big text file on Windows I do it with TextPad.

Paint.net

I run CS6 at home. Having a big monitor, mouse, scanner, etc. make for a better experience with my CS6 Creative Cloud subscription. That said, I have a Lenovo Yoga that I spend a lot of time on and having Paint.net on it for basic image manipulation. It’s a great image editing app. It’s not a Photoshop replacement but for an image editing utility it can’t be beat.

Minimalist GNU for Windows/Minimal SYStem

If you’ve installed Git for Windows, you’ll know these projects as “Git Bash.” While I’m a fan of Powershell and pin it to my taskbar, I’m glad to have this scaled down Bash prompt available to me as well. It’s surprisingly robust.

WinSCP

I’ve just started using this tool as a replacement for FileZilla and like it. The difference maker for me is that the local window is just an Explorer window, which means that all the customization I have on the Explorer context menu are available right in the WinSCP interface. When you’re trying to put out a fire, it’s a big deal to be able to fall back on consistent patterns (right click> open in Sublime Text, for example)

WinMerge

I don’t get bent out of shape with conflicts because I’ve got WinMerge. It’s just good software.

Mongoose

While I’m as happy to spin up a node server to test locally as the next guy, double clicking a file to start up a quick web server is super convenient. No command line needed. Drop mongoose.exe in a folder, double click and you’re good to go. Pretty sweet little app.

7 Zip

The Swiss Army knife for compressed files.

Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Node installed and on my path

Many doors open up if you’ve got common programming languages installed and on your path. I’ve obviously made good use of Java over the years, but I commonly use Node, Python, and even Ruby tools.

S3Fox

While much of the work I do with Amazon S3 and Cloudfront is automated, occasionally you need to get up there and poke around. S3Fox adds an FTP style interface for AWS right into a Firefox tab.

Those are my additions to the Windows web dev canon. What else is out there? What are we missing?

My slides from HTML5DevConf are now up for viewing on Github pages, so you don’t even need to type node web-server.js to view them. There’s one hitch where svgz files aren’t rendering, but I’m not going to worry about that right now. If, in the interim, you really want to see that image, you can grab it from the repo.

There should be video at some point in the future. When there is, I will be sure to let you all know.

I’m also going to be giving this talk at the Boston Front End Developers meetup in May. I’ll be sure to share that as well, once the meetup announcement is online.

Recommended HTML5 and Open Web Platform Books

In which I recommend books that I think are pretty good for HTML5 and general front end engineering.

Spoiler alert! I recommend my own book. I happen to think it’s pretty good so I’m not going to apologize

The Modern State of Web Browsers

In which I talk about the current browser landscape. A post which was rendered a little bit out-of-date a week later when Google announced Blink. On the other hand, my concerns about Opera, outlined in the article, have already been addressed. Blink replaces Presto in the rendering engine landscape and creates a more powerful alternative to Webkit than Presto was ever going to be. Boom! Webkit monoculture averted.

I’ve got one more post ready to go, I’m assuming it will drop next week. I’ll be sure to share when it does.