Whether in agencies, software companies, or creative studios, expert-level CSS is a key skill needed to ship competitive websites, appsand digital products. Developing CSS has become its own profession, but what exactly makes a CSS developer?
The definition of our profession is still unclear, and the stigma of āCSS is not REAL developmentā remains. In her talk at CSSconf EU ā17, Ivana McConnell will dissect how power dynamics and implicit hierarchies threaten to devalue the work we do, and how that hurts us both individually and as a community.
CSS and the hierarchy problem: What makes a CSS developer?
This talk is about hierarchies: as CSS hurtles toward being object- and systems-oriented, the titles and responsibilities of designer and developer become much more fluid and yet, we continue to categorise. We draw lines between front and back end, between CSS and Javascript (āCSS isnāt _real_ developmentā), and even between CSS disciplines, but why? Furthermore, we implicitly draw these lines between white male developers and everyone else. This results in damaging hierarchies that threaten to devalue the work we do in diversifying CSS ā both as a language and as a community.