Twin Cities Code Camp

If you are a full stack developer, you probably occasionally work with stylesheets. If you feel like you are poking a stick blindly into a house of cards when you do, this session is for you. Web design has come a long way since styles were inline and dispersed throughout the markup. Browser support of CSS3 is better, preprocessors have become ubiquitous, and tables are blasphemous. If you haven't been immersed, it's easy to feel lost. This session aims to give you a solid understanding of modern CSS development.

We will review how preprocessors make life easier. We'll differentiate between SASS, Stylus, and LESS and take a look at the Compass framework and libraries like Bourbon. We'll quickly touch responsive design, some of the best parts of CSS3, and testing. The retrospective portion of the talk will involve looking at patterns I've used and encountered. We'll call out the good, bad and ugly to find anti-patterns and appropriate use of what is working. SAAS and lean proof-of-concepts require different strategies, but both should have styles that are scalable and maintainable. We'll define the tools and patterns that can make this possible. You won't be a ninja, but you will be able to include considerations of this important piece of your app's UI when architecting it and help guide practices that will result in better deployments and coverage.