Author: John Au-Yeung

It’s easy for developers to make mistakes. However, we can prevent them if we know about them beforehand.

In this article, we’ll look at mistakes that newbie front-end developers often make that we can all do more to avoid.

---

Not Using Responsive Web Design

With the proliferation of mobile devices around the world, we have to consider them when building our app.

If we didn’t use responsive design, mobile users viewing our app would be looking at lots of tiny text and having to scroll vertically and horizontally to see anything.

We have to make sure that mobile users are considered in any design.

---

Lack of Input Validation

Input validation is important. We can’t just trust users to input everything in the right format.

Therefore, we should check their input on the client-side — to tell users when they’ve input something different from what we’re looking for.

Mistakes are easy to make but also malicious attackers may take advantage of the lack of validation to launch attacks.

---

Cross-Browser Compatibility Issues

Different browsers may render pages differently. We should test everything on a variety of browsers when developing our code.

Most browsers are standards-based, so this should be less of a problem now — but problems can still arise.

If we’re still targeting Internet Explorer, then we definitely should test with IE to make sure that we’ve fixed any issues there.

---

Using Outdated HTML

Outdated HTML just isn’t good. We have to keep abreast of the latest HTML standards so we can take advantage of them.

If it’s available in the browsers that we’re targeting or available as a polyfill, then we can use it.

For layout, we should use flexbox and grid, instead of float. Also, semantic HTML has been the paradigm for years, so we shouldn’t use things like font styling tags.

---

Use of Website Builder Tools

Website builder tools don’t help us much with front-end developers. They’re only used for people that don’t know how to code to build websites quickly.

However, if we’re front-end developers, then we can code. So we shouldn’t rely on them to build web apps or websites.

---

Not Considering Details

There are many details to consider when we’re building the front end — it’s hard to catch all the little things that can be missed.

Ask the designer who’s designed what you’re building to look at your work so that you have chance to catch any flaws in your design.

Fancy and Tiny Fonts

Fancy or tiny fonts are no good. They’re weird and hard on the eyes.

Just use fonts that are known to be easy to read.

---

Broken Links

Never ignore broken links. They don’t provide users with a good experience.

If we have lots of links to check, we may want to write scripts or tests to check them all.

---

Auto-playing Audio and Video

Auto-playing audio and video are always annoying. Most people can’t wait to stop them from playing.

This is especially frustrating when people are using mobile devices with less processing power where we have to wait longer for them to load and stop.

Just stop putting them on our websites.

---

Relying on jQuery

jQuery is an outdated library for manipulating the DOM, adding animations, and also has some functions for data manipulation.

A lot of the functionality has been incorporated into the standard JavaScript API. Therefore, we shouldn’t use it since it just adds to the bloat of our app and doesn’t provide extra utility that we can’t get with the JavaScript standard library on the browser.

If we want to use jQuery for something, we should look for their plain JavaScript equivalent or implement it ourselves.

---

Conclusion

Responsive design is a must for most front end web apps. Unless we really don’t want mobile users to use our app, then we should adopt responsive design now.

Outdated technologies like jQuery and old HTML conventions shouldn’t be used.

Trusting the user too much is a bad idea. We should make sure that we check and sanitize their inputs so that we won’t run into problems later.

Finally, we should think of the user. Don’t play audio and video automatically and fix broken links.

Being a good remote worker takes a lot of discipline. We’ve to do everything ourselves without anyone watching.

In this article, we’ll look at some habits we can adopt to become a good remote developer.

Make Ourselves Visible at Work

When we’re in the office, we’re always visible to others. However, when we’re working remotely, then we most likely aren’t all that visible.

Therefore, we’ve to make ourselves more visible so that we know who each other is.

We should update our profiles of whatever communication software that we’re using.

This might be our Slack profile or something like that.

Also, we shouldn’t make people wait for a response from us. This means that we should check our notification frequently.

This may be hard for developers since many people are busy with meetings or debugging. However, we just got to do this since we can’t nudge each other in person.

Therefore, if we don’t respond, then the person on the other end just waits until we respond.

That’s especially not good if there’re any emergency issues and no one responded. Then the person sending the message just waits anxiously for someone for help.

With computers, we can multitask, so we should at least check and give a quick response to stop people from waiting at the other end.

Also, we should share what we’ve done. Otherwise, no one would know what we’ve been doing all day.

Once in a while, we should set up meetings so we can talk if necessary.

Setting our status on the communication software our team is using is also very useful for letting people know what we’re doing.

Make Time For Socializing

Since we’re in the office, we can’t socialize in person. Therefore, we’ve socialized virtually via video conferencing.

Otherwise, we would be very bored and depressed.

Socializing via video conferencing isn’t ideal, but it’s the best way to do it remotely.

We just set up a meeting where people can join in video audio and video and socialize.

Connect With Our Teammates

To keep ourselves connected, we can talk to our teammates. It’s a good idea to check in once in a while so that we stay connected.

It’s harder than doing it in person, but we can still do it.

Also, code reviews and pair programming sessions are also great ways to connect.

There’re plenty of hard problems to solve, so solving them together is better than trying to solve them alone.

Review Key Projects

To improve ourselves, we should review how we did on key projects.

We can review anything good that we should keep doing and what went wrong.

This then will make us improve by learning from what went wrong and what went well.

Review sessions are a great time to be honest and own up to any mistakes.

Build Accountability

We just got to get things done even if we’re working remotely. It’s even more important since we can’t pretend to be doing something as we do in the office.

If we deliver, then we’re good to go. This should be easier so that we don’t have to spend to commute and we can multitask when we do something when we’ve to do something in a hurry.

Once we’re done with our work, then we can do whatever we want. Therefore, it’s better if we just finish what we have to finish and then take longer breaks.

Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash

Defining Responsibilities

We’ve to divide our work just like in an office-based team. It all goes back to communication.

We divide our work by communicating clearly what everyone is going to do.

If there’s any confusion, then we’ve to clarify it with a call.

One developer can’t do everything, so we still have to divide up our work as if we’re in the office.

This way, we don’t get people doing the same thing or having something that’s not getting done.

Conclusion

Like an office-based developer job, we still got to divide our work by communicating who does what.

We got to review projects when they’re and review what we did well or not well. Then improve on that based on what we learned.

Making ourselves visible is very important. We’ve to turn on notifications and check that we answered our messages. This way, no one is left waiting.

Blogging is a way to write down what we know to the web and share it with others.

In this article, we’ll look at why developers should keep a blog.

Get a Deeper Understanding of Topics by Writing

We can get a deeper understanding of what we’re writing about by doing research.

Therefore, blogging is a great way to let us research and record what we learned.

Developer topics are often read by readers whenever they need help so we can offer them help by writing about the topics we want to know more about and then sharing the knowledge with people via a blog.

Become a Better Developer

From the knowledge that we gained from writing all those entries, we’ll get a better understanding of the topics we write about and become a better developer by applying the topics that we write about.

Blogging will let us explore more topics by looking at them more deeply and looking at things in ways that we didn’t in ways that we don’t during our work by researching and writing about new things.

We learn about both soft and technical topics by doing the research and applying the things we find for work and writing about them.

If we know enough to teach something, then we know that we understand them enough to use them ourselves and help people.

Meet New People

Blogging will make our presence public online. Therefore, people will find us eventually online, especially if we work to promote our blog.

This means that blogging is a great way to build an audience. Therefore, we can use our blog to meet new people and we can exchange ideas with them.

It’s another way to communicate with people that are outside of the local circle of people.

Build Good Relations With Other Developers

We can build relationships with other developers with our own blogs. It makes us better by building relationships with them and then we can help each other.

This is an opportunity that we won’t find by just meeting people at our local locations.

The online world is infinite while our local circle is finite and limited. Building relationships online let us find help with people with more variety of knowledge and they’ll help us in the long run.

Learn New Technologies

Learning new technologies is given when we write a developer blog. If we want to run a blog continuously, we’ve to add new content to it.

If we want to add new content, then we have to learn new technologies so that we can keep populating our blog with new posts.

Therefore, blogging is a great opportunity to learn things that we otherwise wouldn’t have used in the past and keep us ahead of the competition.

Updated Ourselves With the Latest Technologies

In the same vein, we’ll update ourselves to update the technologies that we already know by blogging.

New versions of existing technologies are released all the time and we get to learn about the latest things by blogging about them.

Another benefit is that people like learning about the latest technologies as well.

Therefore, if we post about the latest technologies in our blog, we’ll also get readers since not a lot of people are posting about them yet but people want to know about them.

Show Our Skills

We can show off our skills by blogging about them. If we can teach others then, we know we know enough about the topic that we’re blogging about.

Therefore, it’s a great way to establish ourselves as an authority on a topic and then we can help others by teaching them.

Become More Self-Confident

By blogging about what we learn, we become more self-confident by learning about new technologies and using them to teach people or using them ourselves.

This means that we become more self-confident by helping ourselves and others by learning new technologies and applying our knowledge.

Self-confidence will help us outside of our work and also when we’re doing our developer work.

Conclusion

Developers should write a blog to make ourselves more confident, teach ourselves and others new skills, and update ourselves on the latest technologies in the world.

It’s also a great way to find an audience outside of our local circle of people. Then we can help each other and we can help them out.

As a back end developer, we have a big job. We make apps that manage people’s data and we can make code that does many things to them whether they’re good or not.

In this article, we’ll look at some best practices to take note of when we’re developing back end apps.

Make Sure That We Have Backups

We got to make sure that we have backups in case we screw up any data with any manual operations or bugs in our apps.

Having backups is not enough. We got to check that actually work. This way, we can restore them if we have any issues with them.

Backups should be in multiple locations, for instance, we have some onsite and some in the cloud.

Have Scripts to Copy Data

If we’re copying the same things over and over again, we should have scripts to automate that for us.

This way, we don’t have to type in the same commands over and over again. Also, we avoid screwing things up when we type commands.

Scripts are always the same, but humans are not.

Plan Before Rolling Out Updates

If we’re in charge of managing servers, then we’ve to make sure that we plan for applying updates.

This is something that we may have to do once in a while.

Hopefully, the downtime is minimal so that we don’t have to work off-hours to apply them.

It’s also probably a good idea to apply them to non-production environments first before trying to apply the same updates to a production server.

Have Plans to Scale Up Persistence Solution

We got to have some plans in place to scale up databases if needed. If they run out of capacity, then we have to scale up disk space, memory, or both for example.

We may also do things like sharding to divide data into multiple database servers.

Managing Schema Changes

Schema changes also needed to be managed. We should make sure that they always go smoothly before running the same schema migrations in production.

Fortunately, most frameworks and ORMs have their own schema migration capabilities so that we don’t have to deal with them ourselves.

Otherwise, we’ll have to write our own scripts to do the same thing.

Add Monitoring to Verify the Health of the Persistence Solution

We got to have some way to check that our databases are working. This way, we can actually make sure that our database server is working.

If they go down or have any other issues, then we got to know about them right away.

Most web or cloud hosts have their own solutions, so we should use them.

Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash

Choosing the Best Hosting Solution For Our Apps

We got to choose a good hosting solution for our apps right from the start so that we don’t have to think about migrating to a different host when the one we have isn’t good.

There’re 3 choices. We can use the software as a service, self-hosted in the cloud, or self-hosted in our own hardware.

Software as a service solution would like a web host like Siteground or Bluehost where we just click a few buttons to get things going.

This is good for simple, low traffic apps since they’re mostly shared hosting and don’t have much processing capacity.

If it’s self-hosted, then we can create our own server and change the hardware the way we like. That applies to both the cloud and our own hardware.

With cloud hosting, we use virtual servers hosted on their own hardware to host.

If it’s our own hardware, then we host the virtual servers on our own machine to do the hosting.

Of course, the most flexible is hosting our own hardware. However, that has the most responsibility and there’s no support from anyone unless we pay for someone to manage it.

All in all, we’ve to choose one that suits us. However, more and more businesses are hosting their apps on cloud-based servers because of their balance of convenience and flexibility.

Conclusion

We’ve to deal with lots of issues if we’re working on the back end. Not only do we have to deal with developing the apps, but we also have to deal with backups and servers for hosting our stuff.

This means that we actually have some server and web host knowledge as well in addition to the ability to develop back end apps.

Being a good remote worker takes a lot of discipline. We have to do everything ourselves without anyone watching.

In this article, we’ll look at some habits we can adopt to become a good remote developer.

Practice Good Meeting Etiquette

Good meeting etiquette is very important. Since we’re starting at our screen for meetings and don’t have to go to a physical meeting room, it’s all on us to be a practice good meeting etiquette.

We should have everyone on separate screens. Our face should be on video if we’re participating.

Also, we have to pay attention and don’t get distracted by random things around us.

If we don’t have anything urgent, then we should do other things.

Being on the computer, it’s easy to take notes, so we should do it.

Also, we should probably wear work attire if we turn on video so that we won’t embarrass ourselves if we stand up and have underwear on.

Experiment With What Makes Us the Most Productive

Since we aren’t using only office equipment and staying in the office, we can experiment with our home office setup to see what works for us.

We can wear whatever makes us comfortable as long it’s not underwear or any non-business clothing.

Also, we can shift our start and end times a bit as long we don’t miss any meetings.

The type of work that we do during the day can also change according to our schedule since no one is watching and micromanaging what we’re doing.

We can listen to whatever we want and sit anywhere that makes us more comfortable.

Also, we probably don’t have any set lunch hour. That’s nice since that means we can adjust our lunch schedule the way we wish.

Clear Communication

Since we don’t see each other in person, we can’t read people’s body language to get what they mean when they type a message or talk.

Therefore, we should make sure that everything is clear and that people understand what we want to convey.

Dealing with different time zones and different mediums of communication also makes things harder for us.

Therefore, to make everyone’s lives easier, we should outline our ideas clearly and type out actionable steps.

Meeting notes are more important since we aren’t sitting beside each other to ask questions.

Instead of using a real whiteboard, we have to use a virtual one.

If we have to pair program, we have to talk and share our screens.

Also, no one will know how we feel over the Internet, so we should convey those clearly.

If we need help, we’ve to ask around since not everyone may answer.

Also, we should check our notifications so that we’ll answer people when we see them. People are waiting for our answers and this is more important since no one is around us to answer urgent questions if we need to.

Create Boundaries Between Work and Life

If we’re working 9 to 5 at the office, then we got to set similar boundaries even if we’re working at the office.

There’s just no way that we can work 24 hours a day and not burn out and be tired.

Therefore, we should set some boundaries so that we cut off work the same way that we go home at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, turn off work notifications, close all our work stuff and relax. Also, we should take breaks like we do when we’re in the office.

We got to walk around and clear our minds. Also, lunch breaks are equally important, so we should have them.

Conclusion

Even though we’re working remotely, we got to set our boundaries like we do when we’re working at the office.

The difference is that we have to make sure that we check our notifications more frequently during work hours so that we can answer people’s questions.

Also, we should make sure that we convey everything clearly so that we can be sure that everyone understands us.

Finally, to collaborate, we have to use share screens and use video conference software.