indie_preneur

I Love To Write Cleaner Code Each Day, It's Rad.

11.9.2009

By indie_preneur

I have to confess, I love many things about the phenomenon that is the interweb. If there’s a word I’m not quite sure what it means, I dictionary.com it, and then act like I knew what it meant. If I’m watching one of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld, and I forget who really invaded Spain in the 8th century, Wikipedia waits to comfort my nerves. It’s relatively easy to find a new indie band, and then proclaim to your friends you were listening to them before they actually formed. I love the immediacy of this medium. It’s very plug + play in a sense.

Why I say this is because I came to web from a fine arts / print background. And as much as I love print, I was just drawn to web, and I wasn’t always sure why. Lately, however, I’ve begun to realize what it is.

Although I thrive on feedback and criticism (from a design point of view), rarely is the code ever seen by clients, thus rarely is it ever reviewed. So, as it stands, I am my best and worst critic. I constantly critique my code by the fact that I read blogs and tweets all day relating to newer and cleaner coding techniques and how I may have done this or that in a less-than-ideal way previously.

Each day I strive to try something new, whether it’s relieving myself of divitis, figuring out how to make sites more accessible, trying some new CSS3 tricks, or testing the latest web fonts trend. Unfortunately this is not usually paid work, but as semi-wise old man once said to me “if it is to be, it’s up to me.”

These personal projects are a really nice creative outlet (for all those ideas too out-there for the clients, or that have just been floating around my head), and are a great way to help me break through any kind of designers block I might be having. But more importantly, with each and every project, I implement something I learned from the last time, and usually do it better.

Additionally, being able to create and test a new page right then and there, each project helps me feel more confident in my own skills, and helps me to be able to better communicate with the client as to why we should always strive for the cleanest, most semantic code.

Bonus–another reason why I strive to do this is because I really dislike the word “expert.” There are definitely some people out there who are experts at what they do. And while there are even a lot more who are really good at what they do, I’ve always been of the opinion that you should be constantly getting better, and learning new things, thus not worrying over labels. Let your work and your clients do the labeling, I say spend your time getting better.

Also, I’m not saying I’m a so-called expert, just my thoughts on the matter.

Any suggestions on other ways / tips to constantly improve the development side of web work?

Tags: clean, code, improvement, seinfeld

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 2:33 pm and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.