Hello world...

8 July 2019

Hello world! I've been blogging for what seems like a very very very long time. However, all that blogging over the years has been focused on fashion, lifestyle and travel over on another URL and lately, I've been wanting to dig into more design and front-end focused things and write about them. I have a handful of CSS Grid experiments I did a while ago and didn't write much (read: anything) to go with them and that's just not the way experiments with code should go.

Working on Microsoft Edge and Browser DevTools #

The Microsoft Edge team has gone through some massive changes over the last year, and I've been through so many reorgs I'm a bit dizzy and disoriented by this point but I get to straddle two separate areas in my work: design and product. For design, I do work for Developer Experiences, mostly focusing on webhint and the browser developer tools (DevTools). I am a pixel pusher at heart but the other portion of the work I do is in the Program Management org: talking to developers, evangelizing Edge, and overall finding ways to connect with the community.

And I love all aspects of my job but when we talk about developers a lot of us tend to focus on those writing JavaScript or other programming languages, but not HTML and CSS which is what I love and like to focus on.

Designer or Developer? A Bit of Both #

I find myself again straddling two worlds when it comes to front-end design: I come from a graphic design discipline, but producing website mockups to be handed off to a developer wasn't enough for me, I also dipped my toes into web development. I can write HTML and CSS and if you need me to, I can figure out some JavaScript but what I'm really passionate about is the design and layout side of things: like what problems can we solve with CSS Grid? What about Subgrid? And how on earth do we get back to creating websites that don't all look the same? There's so much fun we can have on the web and I want to play with all the good things coming out.

And what about tooling for these things? Firefox has some great tooling for Grid and Flexbox, but I work on Edge. I want to know how we can make these things better. What else do front-end developers who focus on design need? What doesn't work?

All these things and more are things I want to explore in this blog, so welcome to what I hope will be a different corner of the internet for me to own.

Stephanie