Cheat Sheets, Job Titles and Other Stuff

Posted On: 2010-08-09

Well if this was a perfect world I wouldn't be here writing this right now. Instead I would be on the road, way out in the back country, on my way home from a large family reunion that was held this weekend. Unfortunately ... thanks to someone who forgot to send an important email about some software one of our clients bought early last week ... I'm not.

Instead of spending a weekend catching up with family I spent it sitting in our office downtown loading up the software and coming to grips with a very high-end piece of software that does amazing things. Now if you've followed my scribblings over the years you'll know that amazing software always interests me and this program is no exception but a weekend with the family would have been nice.

Oh well ... at least I am here in the office today instead of dodging kangaroos and speed cameras on the way back and then playing catch up with a backlog of work tomorrow.

Cheat sheets
If you've ever tried something new with HTML, CSS, databases or just about anything else that you might have to use here on the Web you'll know that it's fairly easy to run into trouble. No matter what you're doing, sooner or later you will find that what works in one browser or application won't work in some other browser or application no matter how much you fiddle to get it all happening.

While doing all that fiddling can be a real waste of time you can waste even more time searching the Net for a work-around or a tutorial that might give you some tips on how to overcome your problem. Of course you will undoubtedly find plenty of tutorials but you can almost guarantee that none of them will deal with the specific problem that you have encountered and so you have to keep on searching as your frustration levels rise.

But now there's a website out there that lists cheat sheets, work-arounds and quick reference cards for just about everything you could need. They've got stuff on CSS (in all of its various guises) servers, databases, blogs, text editors, applications, query languages, programming, libraries and frameworks and a whole lot more.

If you've got a problem with whatever it is that you're coding then this looks like the place where you will find the answers and you can find it at devcheatsheet.com.

Is our job title becoming redundant?
Now the 'dev' part of the URL I just mentioned is there because these are cheat sheets for developers but don't think that just because you're a mild-mannered little webmaster this site isn't for you. In this world a webmaster or web designer is just as much a developer as anyone else.

In the past there does seem to have been some clear divisions (at least in some peoples' minds) between a developer and a webmaster. Personally I've always found it hard to see what that division was because webmasters seemed to do quite a lot of the tasks that might appear in a developer's job description and it seems that I'm not alone.

Recently I've begun to see job advertisements for what have been described as front-end developers and when you read the job description it really sounds as though they're talking about web designers and webmasters.

So perhaps our old job title of webmaster is becoming a little redundant. Perhaps now we can start using the much more important-sounding title of front-end developer. For those who know little about what goes on back in the source code of a website that new job title probably sounds much more important and so perhaps you should start using it whenever anyone asks you what line of work you're in.

As I always say: if you can't dazzle them with brilliance you can always baffle them with the other stuff. If they didn't understand what a webmaster did they'll have even less chance of understanding what a front-end developer does.

Do you need some inspiration?
Sometimes work as hard as we do and working alone can be very depressing and it can seem that achieving your goal of making real money just never gets any closer. At times like that it can sometimes help to hear what others who have faced similar struggles and succeeded have to say about their path to success.

If that's what you need then head over to mixergy.com and watch some of the video interviews they have there with people who have started small, struggled mightily and finally succeeded. You might find that some of those stories are quite inspirational and will give you the boost you need to keep going.

And now I'm off to get stuck into all that work that would have still been waiting for me tomorrow if someone hadn't forgotten to send me an email.