5 Articles That Influenced My Career
Do we build the web, or does the web build us?
For nearly all of my career, the web has been both my employer AND my teacher. Looking back, there are a handful of articles that weren’t just bookmarks or blog posts — they marked turning points. Little pushes from fellow web workers that helped move me to where I am today.
Join me for a quick romp through ye olde history as I revisit five articles that helped shape my career.
1. A ‘flexible foundation’ #
I started my career in graphic design, and one of the biggest mental shifts in transitioning from print to web design was working with a ‘squishy’ canvas — you could never truly guarantee what size screen a user would view your design. Not like you could with paper.
Ethan Marcotte’s article on responsive design back in 2010 finally made it click how we could approach this new world of tiny screens. It reshaped how I thought about web design. I feverishly rewrote my portfolio using media queries — something that I was told later helped me land a job at an agency as a hybrid designer/developer. So in a way, this article helped me get my first web job! 😎
2. The problem with specificity and portability #
In the early days of CSS preprocessors, it was very common to see wild, zany selectors in a project’s CSS. Ultra-qualified selectors for avoiding unintentional side-effects, a mish-mash of IDs, classes, and element tags, or even unintentionally deeply nested selectors in a SCSS stylesheet. (Or maybe that was just my CSS 😅)
Several approaches came out during this time, like SMACSS, and later BEF, but the first one I really understood was OOCSS. It seems common sense now to ‘separate structure and skin’ and create styles that work the same everywhere, but it’s thanks to the work of Nicole Sullivan and others that these concepts are so deeply ingrained in our current approaches.
It was also OOCSS and its single-class approach that helped me understand the problem with CSS specificity and how to mitigate it. I started following OOCSS principles and watched my CSS become more durable, resilient, and portable. And waaaaaay fewer !important tags!
3. Vim once, Vim forever #
Around this time, I also read a clickbait-y and unfortunately-named article (that I can no longer find) called “Real Developers Code with Vim”. I, of course, being a 100% authentically real developer, took the bait. I do not agree with the original premise, but that article started my journey into learning Vim.
If that article piqued my interest, it was Drew Neil and his Vimcast series that took me by the hand and let me through a world of custom config files, modal editing, and community plugins. Vim wound up being a gateway into the command line, and I started to understand how UNIX systems worked. Things like how to customize my bash prompt and set up custom aliases naturally flowed from what I learned in Vim and turned the command line from something weird and scary into something that felt like home.
I'm still using Vim today (Neovim specifically), and I can trace back my .vimrc all the way back to 2012. 13 years later, and I STILL feel like a wizard in the terminal. 🧙♂️
4. A new layout paradigm #
Before flexbox landed in the early-to-mid 2010’s we were using CSS floats. Never heard of them? Good, let them rest quietly in the past. 🪦
Chris Coyier and his flexbox guide on CSS Tricks solidified my mental model of how flexbox worked and helped me start creating modern layouts. Things that were previously impossible, like re-ordering elements without altering their source order or even making items in a row the same height, were not just possible, but EASY.
5. Vanilla with sprinkles #
How does Viget JavaScript and Stimulus Controllers and Viget Modules
(This one is cheating a little, but the two articles go together.)
In 2022, I was hired at Viget, which marked the first time I was 100% a developer—my entire career had been in a hybrid role with a mix of designer/developer/director/manager.
This set of articles helped onboard me into a new way of thinking and writing JavaScript, and also marked my entrance into a new era of capability. Classes, modules, promises, async, destructuring, and so much more — the promise (ha, get it?) of ES6 all those years ago was not only fully realized but accelerating!
Honorable Mentions #
Before publishing this article, we talked about this topic as a team (UI Development) and there were a few articles we felt we’d be remiss to leave out:
The Front-End Split #
Brad Frost’s Front-of-the-front-end and Back-of-the-front-end, along with Chris Coyier’s The Great Divide helped us make sense of the diverging skill sets in front-end development. What we choose to call ourselves is important, and is part of why we reorganized the front-end development team here at Viget in 2022.
Componentized Design #
Brad Frost (again) with his Atomic Design helped us start thinking about componentized design and development. This had natural knock-on effects with future tools and techniques like design systems and component-driven development.
A Call to Share #
Looking back, I can see my career not as a straight path but as a breadcrumb trail left by generous strangers on the internet. Those articles weren’t just information — they were people, somewhere, deciding to hit “publish” instead of “maybe later.”
The web is funny that way. It’s not a library we visit; it’s a living garden we tend together. Every tutorial, every blog post, every half-baked gist is a seed. Some quickly grow and spread, others grow quietly in corners, but ALL of them matter more than the author probably realizes at the time.
If the web has fed you (and if you’re reading this, it almost certainly has), think about what you can share back. Share your messy notes, your weird bug fixes, your “I finally figured this out!” revelations. Someone, somewhere, is about to trip over the same obstacle you just climbed, and your breadcrumb might be the one that leads them out.
