The day I realised I was a geek
Note: this is a little bit off track from my usual blog content….a little bit of a retrospective one could say. Maybe you’ll find it interesting nonetheless!
The other day it finally hit home: I’m a geek. The realisation dawned as I typed the following into Google:
sass rem mixin
Huh? I smiled to myself as I realised how nonsensical what I had just typed sounded. To the vast majority of the population, those words would make absolutely no sense at all… and more to the point, those words would have meant little or nothing to me this time last year.
And so it was not only the realisation of my geek-status that dawned on me (I guess to be fair, that probably started happening many years ago now… probably when sitting in a Computer Science lecture at King’s in London, surrounded by a very male-dominated cohort). No, it was also, once again, the realisation of how fast-paced this industry is, and how important it is to keeping learning.
I was the one, who, almost five years ago now, started business in Web Design, stating that I was just going to stick to the simple stuff. “Static websites only, I’m not going to get involved with any of this content management stuff”. A little bit short sighted one could say. It has been, and still is, a journey of continual learning, changes and development. The beauty of being such a tiny company? It’s incredibly easy to change and adapt.
Maybe the industry you’re in is not quite so fast paced; but I’m sure of this – a business that is not continually learning and developing is a stagnant one.
For those of you who are still wondering…
- SASS is a CSS pre-processor that makes it easier to write CSS – introducing variables, nested rules, and more
- (CSS is the language we use to style websites – fonts, colours, position, size, all that good stuff)
- The rem is a relatively new unit of measurement, based on the em. It stands for “root em”
- A mixin (in this context) basically allows you to re-use chunks of CSS, properties or selectors
Makes sense now?!