Learning to Be Flexible

As a freelancer, I work in a lot of different code repos. Almost every team I work with has different ideas of how code should be organized, maintained, and structured.

Now, I’m not here to start a battle about tabs versus spaces or alphabetical order of CSS properties versus organizing in terms of concerns (positioning styles, then element layout styles, then whatever else), because I’m honestly not attached to any one system anymore. I used to be a one-tab kind of person, along with not really even thinking about the ordering of my properties, but slowly, over time, I’ve realized that most of that doesn’t really matter. In all the projects I’ve worked on, the code got written and the product or site worked for the users—which is really the most important thing. What gets me excited about projects now is the code, making something work, seeing it work across different devices, seeing people use something I built, not getting upset about how it’s written.

Since I went down the freelance route again earlier this year, I’m working with many different teams and they all have different standards for how their code should be written. What I really want to know when I start a project is what the standards are, so I can adhere to them. For many teams that means a quick look through their documentation (when they have it, it’s a dream come true—there are no questions and I can just get to work). For other teams, it means I ask a lot of questions after I’ve taken a look at the code to verify how they prefer how they prefer to do things.

Even more so than just thinking about how to write code, there’s the fact that I may be working in straight CSS, Sass, Stylus, Handlebars, plain old HTML, or Jade and I usually roll right along with that as well. Every team makes decisions that suit them and their way of working—I’m there to make life easier by coming in and helping them get a job done, not tell them their whole setup is wrong. The variety keeps me on my toes, but it also helps me remember that there isn’t just one way to do any of this.

What has this really done for me? I’ve started letting go of some things. I have opinions on how to structure and write CSS, but whether it’s written with a pre-processor or not, I don’t always care, and which pre-processor matters less to me as well. Any way you do it, you can get the job done. Choosing what works best for your team is what’s most important, not what anyone outside the team says is the “right” or “only” way to do something.

via planetweb

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