I’m wondering if you can provide some advice for an old-timer looking to get back into the swing of things. I’ve been away from the design/programming world for 6 years now, and prior to that I was running on 10+ years experience developing interactive applications using AS3, HTML, CSS, PHP & MySQL, and a bit of JS. I used PureMVC for my Flash apps, and Codeigniter for my PHP apps.
I believe that I left around the same time the HTML5/CSS3 revolution was taking place, and I’m wondering if someone can briefly fill me in on new libraries and technologies to check out, design/develop practices, and new tools of the trade (I have an Adobe CC subscription, and I’m rubbing my eyes trying to figure out what all these new apps are).
Any advice is much appreciated, and I apologize for the perceived laziness, I have started my own research, and I thought asking a community of designer/developers would be a great place to start.
Sounds like you haven’t been away long, as HTML5 and CSS3 are still rolling out and are very topical. Lots of tools, libraries, frameworks have been hitting the streets of late, so it’s all a bit hard to keep up with. So I always remind myself that, at the center of it all, there’s still the few basic technologies that there have always been.
In the CSS world, a popular option these days is to use ‘preprocessors’—a kind of programmatic way to write your CSS (with variables etc.) before translating it all into normal CSS that the browser can interpret. The big names are Sass, LESS and Stylus.
There are also popular CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.
JavaScript is also booming with new libraries every week it seems, including Backbone, Ember and so on. Node.js—a serverside version of JS—is proving popular, too.
Even PHP has some interesting new frameworks, a standout being Laravel.
There are lots of tools that people love these days, such as Git (and many tools for working with it, too). And there are lots of applications that work with either Ruby or Node.js to help make the development process easier—things like Grunt for all sorts of processing tasks.
