Developing as a Former Developer

It's been a long time, but it's still a good time.

Developing as a Former Developer

I was a developer for 6 years before I became a scrum master in 2015. I’ve kept up with a few development side projects over the years, but most of it has been content updates. I help developers write accessible code at work, but it’s not the same as being a developer. And with the state of Twitter, I decided it was time to build myself a personal blog and I wanted to do it fast. Customizing blog themes was actually how I taught myself CSS and HTML – granted back then it was on Xanga and Blogger.

Getting Started

This time I chose a Jekyll site - because I was somewhat familiar with it - that runs on Github Pages.

Getting Jekyll up and running was pretty straightforward for me. I have a Linux partition on my Chromebook that I already had a side project Jekyll site on. I followed the on boarding documentation on the Jekyll site and I had a site up and running in a few minutes.

For the theme, I knew if I chose to build a theme on my own it would take me weeks to build. I may have spent years being a CSS and HTML developer, but my skills are rusty, and I wanted something ready to blog on in hopefully under a week. So I browsed some Jekyll theme sites, and I ended up buying a theme - Jekyll Origin to be specific. It had the design style I was looking for and Axe didn’t throw a ton of errors that would be hard to fix when I ran it on the demo site.

I got the theme up and running so now it was time to update it to make it more “me”.

Personalization

I started with going through the config.yml file and turning things off and on to get what I wanted setup. Then moved on to picking accessible colors for my site.

Picking accessible colors can be a challenge. I personally use the WebAim color contrast checker. It’s easy to move up and down the color scale to get a shade that’s accessible for what you’re looking for. I knew I wanted a purple and it needed to be compliant on white and black because my site has a light and dark theme.

After I got that picked out, I spent a bit of time configuring the nav and writing content. I was doing a QA check before I pushed to GitHub to start getting Pages configured and realized that the links to my category pages were broken, like broken broken. I spent an hour or so trying to figure out what was going wrong and hadn’t made any progress, so I setup the theme again and copied content over.

That really made me realize how much I loved collaborating with teammates when I was a developer. I’ve had the pleasure of being the mentor to 7 interns over the years, and I started giving them a guideline:

Spend an hour trying to solve the problem, if you’re still lost and not making progress come ask for help.

The hour is a good time box. It teaches younger developers to spend a little bit of time trying to solve a problem, but it also gives them permission to come ask you for help. Since I didn’t have anyone to collaborate with on this project I decided I’d just try again. It took me about 30 minutes to copy everything over. It was time well spent. And I still don’t know what the problem was.

Github Pages

Every time I set up a Github pages site I spend at least 30 minutes completely confused about some random problem that isn’t happening on my localhost. This time it was one of the folders that was used to compile the site happened to be in the gitignore file that came with the theme, so once I corrected that problem it was smooth sailing.

Overall, this project made me realize how much I miss solving coding problems occasionally. It was a nice change of pace from my normal work problem solving which is mostly around how to create organizational change. There are definitely days when I miss being “just a dev” but I also really enjoy being in a leadership position that gets to help make the web better.

Photo by Joshua Reddekopp on Unsplash