This is part of the web truths series of posts.

Every few months there is an article claiming that CSS is not real programming. That CSS is too hard and broken. The language used in these can get creative:

People have some ... um ... intense feelings about CSS. pic.twitter.com/dDspAM8i2F

— Dave Rupert (@davatron5000) September 18, 2017

There is truth to the fact that working with CSS is not traditional programming. There is also truth that CSS has its language faults and that some things are much harder than they should be. That is the case with any standardised language, though. CSS is a way to describe what an interface should be like. It is not the implementation of said interface in a programmatic fashion, like, for example, the Canvas API. That CSS is not like a traditional programming language is by design.

CSS is a great idea when it comes to creating an interface for something as complex and unknown as a user on the web. I talked about the difference of CSS and JavaScript in detail at GOTO Amsterdam where I called it a decision between trust and control.

As a CSS developer, you trust the user agent (in most cases a browser) to do the right thing. You can’t control that it happens, but you also don’t need to sweat the details like performance, paint time and responsiveness. This ball is in the court of the user agent creators and the OS it runs on. And that is a great thing as it allows to fix those important things in one place – where they get applied. If you create interfaces or animations using JavaScript, you have much more granular control. But you also need to ensure everything works. Using CSS means giving up control for the sake of having more time to build a responsive interface catering to the users’ needs. Users need and can mess with your interface settings. CSS is OK with that. Pixel-perfect, defined interfaces are not.

CSS development isn’t programming in the traditional sense where you have loops, conditions and variables. CSS is going that direction to a degree and Sass paved the way. But the most needed skill in CSS is not syntax. It is to understand what interfaces you describe with it. And how to ensure that they are flexible enough that users can’t do things wrong and get locked out. You can avoid a lot of code when you understand HTML and use CSS to style it.

If you don’t consider an interface as an agreement with your users with various levels of fidelity depending on their technical platform, CSS isn’t for you. It is by design a forgiving language, that doesn’t throw any errors when something can’t get applied. Thus it is amazing for progressive enhancement. You don’t even need to worry about adding a line of unsupported code as the parser skips what it can’t apply. What causes a JavaScript parser to throw in the towel and give you an error message, the CSS parser shrugs off and moves on. That can feel odd for a developer – I for one like to know when something went wrong. But it frees you from needing to test on all possible user agents and put “if” statements around everything. Want to use a gradient on button? Define a background color, then override it with a gradient in the next line. If the user agent can’t render gradients, you get a simpler, but still working button. And you didn’t need to worry about gradient support at all.

A lot of “CSS is not real programming” arguments are a basic misunderstanding what CSS is there to achieve. If you want full control over and interface and strive for pixel perfection – don’t use it. If you want to build an interface for an inclusive and diverse web, CSS is a great tool. Writing CSS is describing interfaces and needs empathy with the users. It is not about turning a Photoshop file into a web interface. It requires a different skillset and attitude of the maintainer and initial programmer than a backend language would.

In any case, belittling people who write CSS and considering them not real developers is arrogant nonsense. Especially when you don’t even spend the time to understand what CSS tries to achieve and how amazing it has become.

On the other hand, CSS is not and should not be the solution for everything. Yes, you can create pixels with drop shadows, but you also punish the browser rendering engine with this.

CSS is an integral part of the web to me and whilst the syntax is weird for someone coming from a different programming language, it proved its worth over the years. It should and will not go away for quite some time. So if you don’t like it, pair with someone who does. If your managers demand you to do it, we don’t have a technical issue at our hands, but a project/staffing one.

Instead of having discussions if CSS is broken and needs to be replaced, it is healthier to have different discussions about CSS:

• What CSS can do and where it isn’t enough
• What CSS can do these days that needed other technology in the past and how to apply it
• How to write CSS in a maintainable fashion
• What can you do to make the life of the CSS developer easier?
• What CSS hacks we used and why we should not use them anymore
• What can we do to make CSS richer and better?

Every few months there is a drama happening in the blogging and social media scene. We seem to need that to keep ourselves occupied. It allows us to get distracted from the feeling that the people who pay us have no idea what we do. And keep praising us for things we are not proud of, cementing our impostor syndrome.

For an upcoming talk, I analysed the recurring themes that we get fired up about. I will post one on each of these over the next few weeks.

• CSS is not real programming and broken
• JavaScript can’t be trusted
• We need granular control over web APIs, not abstractions
• The web is better than any other platform as it is backwards compatible and fault tolerant
• The web is broken and backwards compatibility is holding us back
• Publishing on the web using web standards is easy and amazing
• The web is world-wide and needs to be more inclusive
• Mobile is the present and future

Each of these topics can spark thousands of reactions, dozens of blog posts. Many will get you a speaking slot at an event. They are all true, but they are also all not necessarily yielding the amazing insight we expect them to. I’ll try to explain why they are endless loops and what we could do to get past discussing these over and over again. Maybe it is a good time to concentrate on solving other, new, problems instead. And recognise that a new generation of makers and developers may not be as excited about them as we are.

Yes, these will be my opinions and they may spark some discourse. That’s fine. You can disagree with me, and I promise to keep this to the point and civil. I’ve done this for a very long time, I’ve heard many people talk and discuss these. Hopefully my insights will hit a mark with some of you and make us reconsider rehashing the same old discussions over and over again.

I am currently on the train back to London after attending the first two days of Reasons.to in Brighton, England. I need to go to pick up my mail that accumulated in my London flat before going back to Berlin and Seattle in a day, otherwise there would be no way I’d not want to see this conference through to the end.

I don’t want to go. Reasons.to is an amazing experience. Let me start by listing the reasons why you should be part of it as an attendee or as a presenter. I will write up a more detailed report on why this year was amazing for me personally later.

Why reasons.to is a great experience for attendees:

Reasons.to is a conference about creative makers that use technology as a tool. It is not a conference about hard-core technical topics or limited to creating the next app or web site. It is a celebration of creativity and being human about it. If you enjoy Beyond Tellerand, this is also very much for you. That’s not by accident – the organisers of both shows are long-term friends and help each other finding talent and getting the right people together.

As such, it demands more of both the presenters and the audience. There are no recordings of the talks, and there is no way to look up later what happened. It is all about the here and now and about everyone at the event making it a memorable experience.

Over and over the organisers remind the audience to use the time to mingle and network and not worry about asking the presenters for more details. There is no Q&A and there is ample time in breaks to ask in person instead. Don’t worry – presenters are coached that this is something to expect at this event and they all agreed.

There is no food catering – you’re asked to find people to join and go out for breaks, lunches and dinners instead. This is a great opportunity to organize yourselves and even for shy people to leave with a group and have a good excuse to get a bit out of their shell.

This is a getting to know and learning about each other event. And as such, there is no need to advertise itself as an inclusive safe space for people. It just is. You meet people from all kind of backgrounds, families arrive with children and all the people involved in putting on the show know each other.

There are no blatant sponsored talks or holy wars about “framework vs. library” or “technology x vs. technology y”. There is no grandstanding about “here is what I did and it will revolutionise our little world”. There is no “I know this doesn’t work yet, but it will be what you need to use else you’d be outdated and you do it wrong”. And most importantly there is no “this is my showreel, am I not amazing” presentations that are sadly enough often what “creative” events end up having.

The organisers are doing a thorough job finding presenters that are more than safe bets to sell tickets or cover the newest hotness. Instead they work hard to find people who have done amazing things and aren’t necessarily that known but deserve to be.

If anything, there is a very refreshing feeling of meeting people whose work you may know from advertising, on trains, TV or big billboards. And realizing that these are humans and humble about their outrageous achievements. And ready to share their experiences and techniques creating them – warts and all.

The organisers have a keen eye on spotting talent that is amazing but not quite ready to tell the world about it and then making them feel welcome and excited about sharing their story. All the presenters are incredibly successful in what they do, yet none of them are slick and perfect in telling their story. On the contrary, it is very human to see the excitement and how afraid some of these amazing people are in showing you how they work.

Reasons.to is not an event where you will leave with a lot of new and immediately applicable technical knowledge. You will leave, however, with a feeling that even the most talented people are having the same worries as you. And that there is more to you if you just stop stalling and allow yourself to be more creative. And damn the consequences.

Why reasons.to is a great idea for presenters

As a presenter, I found this conference to be incredibly relaxed. It is an entity, it is a happening that is closed in itself without being elitist.

Not having video recordings and having a very low-traffic social media backchannel might be bad for your outside visibility and makes it harder to show the impact you had to your manager. But it makes for a much less stressful environment to present in. Your job is to inspire and deal with the audience at the event, not to deliver a great, reusable video recording or deal with people on social media judging you without having seen you performing or being aware of the context in which you said something.

You have a chance to be yourself. A chance to not only deliver knowledge but share how you came by it and what you did wrong without having to worry about disappointing an audience eager for hard facts. You can be much more vulnerable and human here than at other – more competitive – events.

You need to be ready to be available though. And to spend some extra time in getting to know the other presenters, share tips and details with the audience and to not be a performer that drops in, does the show and moves on. This event is a great opportunity not only to show what you did and want people to try, but it is also a great event to stay at and take in every other talk. Not to compare, but to just learn about people like you but with vastly different backgrounds and approaches.

There is no place for ego at this event. That’s a great thing as it also means that you don’t need to be the perfect presenter. Instead you’re expected to share your excitement and be ready to show mistakes you made. As you would with a group of friends. This is refreshing and a great opportunity for people who have something to show and share but aren’t quite sure if the stage is theirs to command.

TL;DR: I am going on holiday for a week and don’t take any computer with me. When I’m back I will cut down on my travels, social media and conference participation and focus more on coaching others, writing and developing with a real production focus.

You won’t hear much from me in the next week or so as I am taking a well-deserved vacation. I’m off to take my partner to the Cayman Islands to visit friends who have a house with a spare room as hotels started to feel like work for me. I’m also making the conscious decision to not take any computer with me as I will be tempted to do work whilst I am there. Which would be silly.

Having just been in a lot of meetings with other DevRel people and a great event about it I found a pattern: we all have no idea how to measure our success and feel oddly unsatisfied if not worried about this. And we are all worried about keeping up to do date in a daily changing market.

I’m doing OK on both of these, but I also suffer from the same worries. Furthermore, I am disturbed about the gap between what we talk about at events and workshops and what gets released in the market afterwards.

The huge gap between publication and application

We have all the information what not to do to create engaging, fast and reliable solutions. We have all the information how to even automate some of these to not disrupt fast development processes. And yet I feel a massive lack of longevity or maintainability in all the products I see and use. I even see a really disturbing re-emergence of “this only needs to work on browser $x and platform $y” thinking. As if the last decade hadn’t happened. Business decisions dictate what goes into production, less so what we get excited about.

Even more worrying is security. We use a lot of third party code, give it full access to machines and fail to keep it up-to-date. We also happily use new and untested code in production even when the original developers state categorically that it shouldn’t be used in that manner.

When it comes to following the tech news I see us tumbling in loops. Where in the past there was a monthly cadence of interesting things to come out, more readily available publication channels and a “stream of news” mentality makes it a full-time job just to keep up with what’s happening.

Many thoughtpieces show up in several newsletters and get repurposed even if the original authors admitted in commentary that they were wrong. A lot is about being new and fast, not about being right.

There is also a weird premature productisation happening. When JavaScript, Browsers and the web weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, we showed and explained coding tricks and workarounds in blog posts. Now we find a solution, wrap it in a package or a library and release it for people to use. This is a natural progression in any software, but I miss the re-use and mulling around of the original thought. And I am also pretty sure that the usage numbers and stars on GitHub are pretty inflated.

My new (old) work modus

Instead of speaking at a high amount of conferences, I will be much pickier with where I go. My time is more limited now, and I want to use my talents to have a more direct impact. This is due to a few reasons:

• I want to be able to measure more directly what I do – it is a good feeling to be told that you were inspiring and great. But it fails to stay a good feeling when you don’t directly see something coming out of it. That’s why instead of going from event to event I will spend more time developing tools and working directly with people who build products.
• I joined a new team that is much more data driven – our job is to ensure people can build great apps and help them by fixing our platform and help them apply best practices instead of just hearing about them. This is exciting – I will be able to see just how applicable what we talk about really is and collect data of its impact. Just like any good trainer should ensure that the course attendees really learned what you talked about this is a full feedback loop for cool technologies like ServiceWorker and Push Nofifications.
• We just hired a truckload of talented people to coach – and I do want to see other people on stage than the usual suspects. It is great to see people grow with help you can give.
• I just had a cancer growth removed from my face – it was benign but it is kind of a wake-up call to take more care about myself and have my body looked after better on an ongoing basis
• I am moving to Berlin to exclusively live there with my partner and our dog – I’ve lived out of suitcases for years now and while this is great it is fun to have a proper home with people you care about to look after. I will very much miss London, but I am done with the politics there and I don’t want to maintain two places any longer.
• I will spend more time coding – I am taking over some of the work on PWAbuilder and other helper tools and try them out directly with partners. Working in the open is great, but there is a huge difference between what Twitter wants and what people really need
• I will write more – both articles and blog posts. I will also have a massive stab at refreshing the Developer Evangelism Handbook
• I will work more with my employer and its partners – there is a huge group of gifted, but very busy developers out there that would love to use more state-of-the-art technology but have no time to try it out or to go to conferences.

What this means for events and meetups

Simple.

• I will attend less – instead I will connect conferences and meetups with other people who are not as in demand but great at what they do. I am also helping and mentoring people inside and outside the company to be invited instead of me. A lot of times a recommendation is all that is needed. And a helping hand in getting over the fear of “not being good enough”.
• I will stay shorter – I want to still give keynotes and will consider more workshops. But I won’t be booking conferences back-to-back and will not take part in a lot of the social activities. Unless my partner is also coming along. Even better when the dog is allowed, too.
• I am offering to help others – to review their work to get picked and help conference organisers to pick new, more diverse, talent.

I have a lot of friends who do events and I will keep supporting those I know have their full heart in them. I will also try to be supportive for others that need a boost for their new event. But I think it is a good time to help others step up. As my colleague Charles Morris just said at DevRelConf, “not all conferences need a Chris Heilmann”. It is easy to get overly excited about the demand you create. But it is as important to not let it take over your life.

Last week I was in Seattle to attend a few meetings and I was lucky to attend DevRelSummit in the Galvanize space. I was invited to cover an “Ask me anything” slot about Developer Outreach in Microsoft and help out Charles Morris of the Edge team who gave a presentation a similar matter.

Q & A session with @Microsoft's @codepo8 about #devrel. #DevRelSummit #tech #microsoft pic.twitter.com/PFaW8Wi4Fl

— Angel Banks (@angelmbanks) August 11, 2017

It feels weird to have a conference that is pretty meta about the subject of Developer relations (and there is even a ConfConf for conference organisers), but I can wholeheartedly recommend DevRelSummit for people who already work in this field and those who want to.

The line-up and presentations were full of people who know their job and shared real information from the trenches instead of advertising products to help you. This is a very common worry when a new field in our job market gains traction. Anyone who runs events or outreach programs drowns in daily offers of “the turn-key solution to devrel success” or similar snake oil.

In short, the presentations were:

• Bear Douglas of Slack (formerly Twitter and Facebook) sharing wins and fails of developer outreach
• Charles Morris of Microsoft showing how he scaled from 3 people on the Edge team to a whole group, aligning engineering and outreach
• Kyle Paul showing how to grow a community in spaces that are not technical cool spots and how to measure DevFest success
• AJ Glasser of Unity explaining how to deal with and harvest feedback you get showing some traps to avoid
• Damon Hernandez of Samsung talking about building community around hackathons
• Linda Xie of Sourcegraph showing the product and growth cycle of a new software product
• Robert Nyman of Google showing how he got into DevRel and what can be done to stay safe and sound on the road
• Angel Banks and Beth Laing sharing the road to and the way to deliver an inclusive conference with their “We Rise” event as the example
• Jessica Tremblay and Sam Richard showing how IBM scaled their developer community

In between the presentations there were breakout discussions, lightning talks and general space and time to network and share information.

As expected, the huge topics of the event were increasing diversity, running events smoothly, scaling developer outreach and measuring devrel success. Also, as expected, there were dozens of ways and ideas how to do these things with consensus and agreeable discourse.

All in all, DevRelSummit was a very well executed event and a superb networking opportunity without any commercial overhead. There was a significant lack of grandstanding and it was exciting to have a clear and open information exchange amongst people who should be in competition but know that when it comes to building communities, this is not helpful. There is a finite amount of people we want to reach doing Developer Relations. There is no point in trying to subdivide this group even further.

Cheers to another successful @DevRelSummit, Sandra & Barry! ?@SandraPersing @bteiger pic.twitter.com/aPVfpvRe9w

— Tia Over (@tiaover) August 12, 2017

I want to thank everyone involved about the flawless execution and the willingness to share. Having a invite-only slack group with pre-set channels for each talk and session was incredibly helpful and means the conversations are going on right now.

DevRelSummit showed that when you get a dedicated group of people together who know their jobs and are willing to share that you can get an event to be highly educational without any of the drama that plights other events. We have a lot of problems to solve and many of them are very human issues. A common consensus of the event was that we have to deal with humans and relate to them. Numbers and products are good and useful, but not burning out or burning bridges even with the best of intentions are even more important.