My friend Dan asked if I’d be talking about cooking as a dev skill for WordCamp Minneapolis.
.@Ipstenu I'm assuming cooking as a dev will be your @WordCampMpls talk submission
— Dan Beil (@add_action_dan) February 17, 2016
While I won’t be making that camp this year (sorry folks), I thought I’d take a moment to talk about cooking as a dev skill. Or rather, what cooking teaches you about developing a website.
Know What You Want to Cook
You can’t just decide to throw things together until you’ve been cooking for so long, and you’re an expert at winging it. Most of the time, we pick a recipe we know, or feel we can follow, and decide what we want to make. We have to temper this with what we need to make. If I’m making dinner, I need protein and vegetables. If I’m making a pie, do I need the pie or do I just want something sweet?
Websites are the same way. We pick the site we want to make before we start building. When you go into making your site, you have to know what you want the site to be. You also have to know what you need. I need a web presence (it’s 2016, yes you do), but I don’t need a video and an interactive game and all the bells and whistles.
Check Your Ingredients
Open the door to your refrigerator and make a list of what you have. Look at the recipe. Do you have what you require to make this dish? If you’re ordering out, you get the meal pre-made. When you’re making it yourself, you need to make sure you have salt and butter and tofu and eggs.
When we talk about webpages, we talk about the code behind it. Can you design something out of nothing? Do you have the tools with which to do so? Can you write javascript and PHP and HTML? These are things you need, these are your ingredients. They’re also going to be your libraries like Backbone and React.
Mise En Place
In cooking, setting up everything beforehand makes the entire cooking experience better. I’m terrible at it, but I’m doing my best to get better, because once I’m prepared, everything flows and I’m less of a whirling dervish. The setup doesn’t just keep you organized, it keeps you real. It lays everything out and sometimes, when you look at 10 pats of butter, you may think about maybe cutting down a little.
Speaking of those libraries, make sure you have only what you need. The whole Backbone repository is over 5 megs. The one file you need is 69kb. Use only what you need. The more individual pieces you need, the more you should scrutinize them. Did you really need all that in the first place? Do you really need eleven css files for options of display, or should you make a basic one and let people build what they want?
The Cake Will Collapse
You’re going to mess things up. You’ll burn the caramel, overcook the pasta, underboil the egg, and so on and so forth. These mistakes are okay. As Julia Child said it, “No on will ever know!”
Do I even need to say it? Your code will fail. A lot. In weird ways. You may spend an hour wondering why WP-CLI fails, only to remember it’s WP_CLI instead.
