My role at Clearleft is something along the lines of being a technical director. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it seems to be a way of being involved in front-end development, without necessarily writing much actual code. That's probably for the best. My colleagues Mark, Graham, and Charlotte are far more efficient at doing that. In return, I do my best to support them and make sure that they've got whatever they need (in terms of resources, time, and space) to get on with their work.
I'm continuously impressed not only by the quality of their output on client projects, but also by their output on the side.
Mark is working a project called Fractal. It's a tool for creating component libraries, something he has written about before. The next steps involve getting the code to version 1.0 and completing the documentation. Then you'll be hearing a lot more about this. The tricky thing right now is fitting it in around client work. It's going to be very exciting though—everyone who has been beta-testing Fractal has had very kind words to say. It's quite an impressive piece of work, especially considering that it's the work of one person.
Graham is continuing on his crazily-ambitious project to recreate the classic NES game Legend Of Zelda using web technology. His documentation of his process is practically a book:
- Introduction,
- The Game Loop,
- Drawing to the Screen,
- Handling User Input,
- Scaling the Canvas,
- Animation — Part 1,
- Levels & Collision — part 1, and most recently
- Levels — part 2.
It's simultaneously a project that involves the past—retro gaming—and the future—playing with the latest additions to JavaScript in modern browsers (something that feeds directly back into client work).
Charlotte has been speaking up a storm. She spoke at the Up Front conference in Manchester about component libraries:
The process of building a pattern library or any kind of modular design system requires a different approach to delivering a set of finished pages. Even when the final deliverable is a pattern library, we often still have to design pages for approval. When everyone is so used to working with pages, it can be difficult to adopt a new way of thinking—particularly for those who are not designers and developers.
This talk will look at how we can help everyone in the team adopt pattern thinking. This includes anyone with a decision to make—not just designers and developers. Everyone in the team can start building a shared vocabulary and attempt to make the challenge of naming things a little easier.
Then she spoke at Dot York about her learning process:
As a web developer, I’m learning all the time. I need to know how to make my code work, but more importantly, I want to understand why my code works. I’ve learnt most of what I know from people sharing what they know and I love that I can now do the same. In my talk I want to share my highlights and frustrations of continuous learning, my experiences of working with a mentor and fitting it into my first year at Clearleft.
She'll also be speaking at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin later this year. Oh, and she's also now a co-organiser of the brilliant Codebar events that happen every Tuesday here in Brighton.
Altogether that's an impressive amount of output from Clearleft's developers. And all of that doesn't include the client work that Mark, Graham, and Charlotte are doing. They inspire me!
This was originally published on my own site.
