Modern Web Development Series from Shawn Wildermuth

As a cloud guy focused on Windows Azure, I haven’t done much client-side coding in a while.  But, I’ve been getting my hands dirty lately working on an Azure-related web project I’ll be talking about soon. 

Web programming has always been fun to me because it’s relatively easy to learn bit by bit.  The ability to visit any website and right-click “View Source” to find out how things work is empowering.  Given a little time, almost anyone with computer skills can figure out how to hack a site together--  with “hack” being the key word there.

With any technology, the more time you spend on it, the more you develop best practices for doing it more efficiently.  As I’ve been digging into things like HTML5, CSS, and jQuery, I’m blown away by the vast amount of knowledge & content out there. A Bing or Google search pretty much has answered every elementary question I’ve had along the way.  This has further enabled my ability to hack things together.

The site I am working on is mostly static, and will likely have a short-term lifespan.  For this type of site, the hacks will likely be good enough. But I’d sure like to pick up some good web programming practices along the way for the next time I need to do this.  I don’t want to be embarrassed when someone does a “View Source” on future sites of mine!

It’s A Small World

It turns out, I’m not the only one re-visiting client-side code after being server-side for a while.  On Twitter yesterday, Shawn Wildermuth referred me to a new blog post series he is working on.

Shawn has been working on a web project the past year after spending a lot of his time on server code and RIA (Silverlight/WPF) development the past few years.  He has decided to chronicle his learnings from jumping back into web programming with a 10-part blog post series:

Shawn Wildermuth’s Modern Web Development Series

Here are the topics he plans on covering:

So far, Shawn has got his first three posts up.  The rest are on the way, and based on his topic list, it looks like they’ll be a great read! Looking forward to it!