1153 Web Development Visual Tools: Solid Or Cheating? - Simple Programmer Podcast
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Hey, what's up? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.

We'll be talking a little bit about web development today and using visual tools to do it. My old friend,

Dreamweaver. This is from Kishan and he says, "Hi John, I just want to talk about web development software." All right, I just want to talk about web development software too. Let's talk about web development software. All right. "You may have or haven't known about something from Adobe called Macromedia Dreamweaver." Yes, I have known about it. I remember getting cracked versions of this way back when I was like 19 years old or whatever in order to do web development. Not that I recommend doing that today.

This piece of software will allow you to change visuals, e.g. tables, CSS and interactive features for your website without you having to touch the code. Do you think it is a good way of web development or a bad way? In addition, if you want to become a freelancer in web development, would it be a good idea to use Dreamweaver? Take care." I've got sort of an opinion on this that—

I actually did a course, so I'll tell you about—a lot of people say, "Oh, don't use visual editors or visual stuff because it's cheating. You don't really understand what's going on and you should just do everything command line or do everything in Notepad and write your HTML in there and everything." I don't necessarily agree with that. I did a course on Pluralsight. You could check out.

on SVN. That's Source Control Management System. I didn't do it like most people would do it on SVN. I used Tortoise SVN which was a graphical SVN tool and I did everything graphically. There was a reason why I did that and that was because it just was more intuitive and it made sense and it was easy and it saved me a bunch of time rather than typing in a bunch of command line stuff. You would say, "Oh, well, a real expert would have done it from the command line."

Maybe, but what's more effective? What's more practical? What's more pragmatic? Again, now I could do a lot of the stuff from the command line. I still can with SVN and I needed to learn that stuff and I did learn that stuff and there's a dog in the frame, but that's all right. What I did was I focused on what was pragmatic. Think of it this way. If you're doing web development, okay?

If it's more useful to you to use a tool like Dreamweaver, if it's easier for you to manipulate elements, to manipulate the CSS, to change the properties of things, some people will look at you and frown at you and say, "Hey, you're not a real web developer because you're not manually editing the CSS." That's fine. They can say that all they want, but when you get work done 3 times as fast, that speaks much more louder than any of the words that they're saying. Here's the thing.

If you're just relying on the visual elements and you don't understand the underlying, then that's a problem because sometimes Dreamweaver is going to break down. Sometimes you're going to need to look at the raw HTML on the webpage and you're not going to have Dreamweaver. Sometimes you're going to need to troubleshoot a problem and if you don't understand what's going on or how the CSS and HTML behind the scenes work or you don't understand the code, whatever context you're applying this to, you don't understand how that stuff works, then

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You're going to be stuck and you're going to be in trouble. You're not going to understand the nuances that exist because that—

That Dreamweaver, that SVN, Tortoise SVN, it's an abstraction over something. It's making things simpler by giving you a visual abstraction. I'm all for using visual IDEs and visual development tools, but I'm also for understanding the underlying code behind them. Code generators, for example, in programming, great tools, save you a lot of time.

but you have to understand how they're working and you have to understand the code that they're creating. You need to have that depth of knowledge and then you can take it and apply the abstractions and use shortcuts. There's a lot of developers that go too far in one direction. There's some developers that they're like, I just want to use these visual tools and I'm not going to understand what's happening underneath the covers. I'm just going to stay at that level of abstraction and they get into trouble because they're

They don't understand what's going on. When they debug things, they don't have enough of a knowledge of the space. Then there's other developers that insist on not using an IDE and coding up everything in Notepad. I went to this company and did some consulting and all the developers were like, "Oh, yes, we write our Java code in Notepad and then we compile it on the command line." I'm like, "No."

It's good that you can do that, but you could be saving a lot of time by using an IDE. You could be saving a lot of effort by doing that. You got to find the balance. What it really comes down to is that you have to know the technology, know the underlying

thing, unless the abstraction is perfect. Most abstractions are not. Most abstractions are leaky, but you have to know the underlying technology and the underlying thing and then use the tool. Use the thing that—the abstraction that's built over that makes things convenient. I think—I don't know a huge amount about videography and photography, but I've had to learn enough about it to know that

point and shoot is not like—you can't be a great photographer with just point and shoot. Now, you could probably get away with that or get away with things like autofocus and some of the auto stuff that the camera does.

You need to know about lighting and the actual aperture and all of these details that I'm not an expert in about all this stuff if you want to be good even though you may use some of these automated features from time to time, but sometimes you're going to have to crack

it open and probably most of the time you're going to have to get down to the low level stuff and understand that stuff. You're not going to be really good—you could fake it and you could pretend to be good and you could shoot some decent video or some decent photos just using the auto

features and autofocus and all that stuff, but you're not really going to be—you're not really going to understand what you're doing. That's not a way. Dreamweaver by itself, don't just use that. Understand HTML and CSS, but then use that if it makes you faster and I think it will. That's why that tool was invented. It wasn't invented to make it so you didn't have to know anything about CSS and HTML.

At least that's my opinion on it. All right, that's all I got to say about that. If you like this video make sure you click that Subscribe button below and click the bell to make sure you don't miss any videos. I'll talk to you next time. Take care.