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So much new CSS stuff! How can we keep up?!
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The article I mentioned: https://www.kevinpowell.co/article/unexpected-achievements/
In this episode, I discuss the challenges of keeping up with front-end development, the feelings of imposter syndrome that many developers face, and the importance of focused learning in a rapidly changing tech landscape. I emphasize that it's not necessary to know everything and that developers should focus on a few key features at a time. I also touch on the evolution of search engines and the impact of AI on search results, concluding with strategies for staying updated in the tech world without feeling overwhelmed.
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Transcript
Introduction and Themes
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello my front-end friends and welcome to my podcast General Musings. My name is Kevin and here at my podcast I like to talk about whatever is front of mind for me in any given week, usually in some way that's related to front-end development and something that comes up a lot and for some reason it's come up more in the last like two weeks than usual through my emails and socials and and questions on YouTube and other stuff.
00:00:26
Speaker
is people asking me how I keep up with the state of CSS and at the same time I want to talk a little bit about imposter syndrome as well because I think in certain ways these types of things are related and also when I say that keeping up with CSS that's what people usually ask me but I think it's keeping up with front-end development in general is an issue these days just with the fast pace of change that's going on so The reason that I'm bringing up imposter syndrome is I recently wrote an article on my website
Experiencing Imposter Syndrome
00:00:59
Speaker
about it. ah Just talking about how I'm actually feeling more imposter syndrome now looking back at some of the things I did last year, which is super strange, right? Because those things happened, they went well and looking back, I'm like, oh my goodness. Anyway, whatever. It doesn't really matter if you want more about that, you can
00:01:17
Speaker
ah definitely read the article but I think that when people feel like they're not keeping up with things sometimes they also get those feelings of imposter syndrome and stuff like that so if ever that's you don't feel like you need to be keeping up with everything I think is the most important thing I don't keep up with everything and I literally teach CSS for a living and my job is sort of to keep up with everything and tell people about all the things that are going on and I'm unable to do it. so and And that's on one of the niches of web development.
00:01:50
Speaker
so If ever you feel like you're kind of behind on things, please don't let that make you think that you're not as good of a developer as maybe you think you should be or you are actually. ah you know The negativity that can come around these things can sometimes be quite high and I just want to reinforce that you shouldn't let it. That aspect of things make you feel bad about where you are as a developer.
Challenges of Keeping Up with CSS
00:02:20
Speaker
Because the most important thing isn't keeping up with the cutting edge of everything and it's not even sort of It's it's hard just I'm trying to figure out exactly how I want to say this But you don't need to be you don't want to be at the cutting edge to be honest being at the cutting edge can be fun for someone like me who just likes dabbling in a lot of these things and But it just means you're finding out about a whole bunch of things you can't actually use in production yet, which can be really frustrating. So there's there's definitely a negative side to keeping up with everything in that you have to wait to actually use things. And then when you check can I use at one point and you realize you can use that thing you talked about two years ago, you're super happy. Then you have to relearn it all anyway because you haven't used it in so long. So ah there is that, but there's also like
00:03:11
Speaker
A lot of the things that are happening will, first of all, because of browser support, but just in general, you might not need them. If you're able to do what you need to do for your job or for the project you're working on or for your current sprint or whatever it is.
00:03:27
Speaker
you don't need to know that cutting edge thing or that even that that new thing that came out 18 months ago or whatever it is like you don't need to know that or integrate it in there just because it exists and one of the things that's happening with a lot of the new CSS features we're getting is it's making some things possible that were impossible before which is really nice And other parts of it are making things a lot easier than they were. And so one of the cutting edge things that I'm thinking of here that you ah you could potentially use with the polyfill as long as you're careful and you're aware of the limitations of the polyfill is anchor positioning.
Strategies for Staying Updated
00:04:03
Speaker
Anchor positioning is amazing, and it solves a really big pain point for developers, and it's going to be something that definitely is going to pick up traction, especially once browser support improves for it. And I think people are going to learn it and start integrating it quite quickly ah once once we get like once that browser support thing is there.
00:04:23
Speaker
But like, if you're creating something where you don't need anchor positioning, it really doesn't matter, right? If who cares about anchor positioning, but if you're not making a tooltip, or you don't need to anchor an element to something else, whatever it is, you know what I mean? ah And I think that's the important thing isn't to keep up with everything that's going on and knowing how it works, because even like I was talking to the dev rel people at Google, I thought individually you might have seen my videos of or one of them is not out yet, but I have a video coming soon with Brahmas and I've had a bunch of videos with Adam, but um the Adam content has started rolling out.
00:05:01
Speaker
And so like individually, I asked them about keeping up with things, just because I'm always curious for people that are deeply invested in front end and CSS, how they manage to keep up with it. Because since I get asked, I'm like, I don't have good answers. So maybe these other people have good answers. And for them, a lot of it is they're aware of all the things that are going on, but they're only really focused on a few different features at a time.
00:05:25
Speaker
So like Brahmas was very focused on view transitions and scroll-driven animations, for example. And that was, if you look at the content for those on like the Google DevRel stuff, it's Brahmas doing a lot of it, sometimes with other people as well. And so they they go very deep on those. And like Adam's working on two or three very specific things right now, or with the anchor positioning, you know, is very involved in that. It wasn't the whole team all aware of everything and deep diving all of these different things.
00:05:54
Speaker
It's they sort of get the specific things that they're working on and they can be really focused on those. And you might notice that happens with me as well when a certain feature becomes something I start using a lot. I might have two, three, four videos come out within two months on that topic because I keep going deeper and deeper and into it and and finding more to talk about with it.
00:06:15
Speaker
And even like with the view transitions, I got to a point where I was getting stuck with them and that's why I have a video coming up with Bramus. Because I was like, well, Bramus is doing all this amazing stuff with the view transitions and has all this good content on it. Instead of banging my head, I should go and talk to him. And then I might as well just record that conversation and we build something together, which is exactly what the video is going to be.
00:06:36
Speaker
ah Though that it's been delayed a little bit because there were some issues with the recording, so I have to re-record parts of it without him covering what we talked about in the video. Anyway, ah that's a story for another day. And so this is like a really long way to say that like it's easy to have a deep knowledge on specific things if you take the time to dive in and really learn them.
00:06:57
Speaker
And as a lot of these newer features are coming, they're also more complex than other things, right? Like if you're doing you're learning about margins, margins won't take you that long to learn. There's that's including the weird stuff with them and understanding collapsing margins. And then, oh, now they don't collapse because we're in grid or the auto top and bottom works in these situations, but it acts as zero in these other situations. like There's a lot in something that seems like a very simple topic, but you can sort of get there with a bit of experience and just reading enough on it within ah a day, right? You could learn a lot about how margins work and probably
00:07:34
Speaker
be very comfortable with all the edge cases and everything else going on but then when you start getting into a lot of these newer things there's a lot more than just the basics you start with the basics and just keeps going and keeps going and keeps going and so you're not going to know it all and i think that's okay i think the most important thing If you are in web development space, which I'm assuming you are if you're listening to this, but any space that moves as quickly as web development as well, it's being a aware of the general pulse of things and being aware of what's possible, not not how to do it, not what the features even called.
00:08:13
Speaker
but that there is a way to do something. right so and And the reason this is important is so when you do get stuck at work, you're on that sprint and everything you're doing is fine and you you go through like all of the different things you need to do and then you get stuck on something. Or maybe there's something you've been doing for a really long time that you're able to do, but it sort of sucks. You hate It feels hacky or you just hate the way that you have to approach it or something about it doesn't seem like it's the way it should be. I think those are those times maybe you go, oh, maybe I should look up to see if there is a better way of doing this.
00:08:51
Speaker
It's possible there's not there's still holes in in what's possible, but there's a lot more possible now so you might find something or if you're keeping a general feel of the different things that are going on and That's not even like reading in-depth blog posts, but it's like oh, there's a blog post on this new thing I never heard of click it skim through it just to get a gist of what it's actually about and be aware of that feature and a little bit of what that feature is and don't have to memorize the name of the feature. Just know like oh this is possible with CSS now.
Search Engines and Market Trends
00:09:21
Speaker
ah So when that problem comes up for you and you're gonna be like oh I think I remember reading something about this and that I can do it with CSS only and then hopefully you can remember the right search terms to look up to actually find it and it's also the problem there is not being able to rely on necessarily things like AI that might not have that as part of their training data
00:09:42
Speaker
um depending on how far back it goes. But if it's actually going to be usable in the browser, um maybe that can help you find the answer to whatever. However you're searching for things these days. so Really quick side note on that just to take a little bit of a tangent. I was just reading an article today about for the first time in 10 years, Google's dropped to below 90 percent of all search.
00:10:07
Speaker
And I was like, oh, are they counting things like, you know, AI, you know, people are GPTing instead of Googling now, right? ah But that wasn't even part of the drop. Maybe. Okay, there's i'm now that I'm saying so loud, maybe it was a little bit part of it. But I'll start with what the the article was saying was that it's only looking at search they're down to like 89.7 percent or whatever and it was over a three month average like the last three months of 2024 were all below 90 percent and it was the first time since 2015 that that has happened and then what i loved was like when they talked about the ones the three top ones after that i just know yahoo was included in there and i'm like really
00:10:51
Speaker
who's i Honestly, I would love to know who still uses the Yahoo as a search engine. um I should try using it just to see what the results are like. ah i'm just i don't is it go to just be It makes me think of the old web. like I used Yahoo back in the day. That was my search engine because Google didn't even exist. Or if it did, I wasn't using it at the very beginning. Yahoo was the search engine. right and for so I just have that old web vibe about it in my mind. and I think any Yahoo other things I've seen,
00:11:20
Speaker
have always been so ad-ridden and like it moved into that space that i'm like i don't know if i'd want to but i might try it out just to see for fun but bing was in second place with about four percent anyway when i assumed bing would be the second ah place one and yeah i tried using bing for a while and i just never if the results weren't as good as google so i stopped but uh yeah what i was gonna say is i'm wondering if What's happened is like someone who's using Yahoo, I could be wrong about this, but it might be an older generation of people who just continue using it. And maybe it's just the people who are using Google have moved to their Googling less. But yeah, it could be that right. It's the more computer savvy or the less computer savvy people were just using the default browser thing. So if you're on
00:12:10
Speaker
ah Windows computer and then it's defaulting in edge to Bing or you're very you know, you just your old school and you go to Yahoo or whatever and so it could be that people who were using Google or googling less and because of that it's pushed up the browser share or the search share or whatever the the User share of people searching through other browsers because I mean it's a really small drop, but I don't know if that accounts for everything.
AI in Search Engines: Frustration and Impact
00:12:36
Speaker
I think that Maybe could account for a little bit um And I think part of it, I'm also, my initial thought was people are not using Google because all the AI stuff they're cramming in there is really annoying. I know now every time I use Google and it gives me the AI answer at the top, I just get frustrated with it. um there There are times, okay, what Google's always been really good at doing, this is we've gone off in a completely different direction here. We're in podcast mode though, so hopefully you're just here for a listen while you're driving or doing the dishes or something so you don't mind.
00:13:09
Speaker
But what Google was traditionally really good at, and if you, when I got a little bit into ah SEO stuff, I learned a lot about this, where you could find like holes within the search algorithms and stuff to like make content on certain topics because there was holes in in the content.
00:13:27
Speaker
and but okay what Google is really good at doing is knowing the intent of the person's search so if you were searching and it still does this where say you write in I don't know something like shoes the first results after now their AI slop will be um shopping stuff and then if you look up restaurants you'll probably get a map come up and it's nearby restaurants and I'm getting very generic now but even if you're getting more specific searches the same thing would actually be happening right where if you looked up I'm trying to like others a lot of how-to stuff it would surface videos if not first very early in the search and then if you looked up ah some other topics it would lead to blog posts and other things and just through
00:14:18
Speaker
Knowing the user's behaviors through billions of searches and what users would go to, it learned what people were looking for when they did specific types of searches and they would put those types of results as the first things the user would see.
00:14:33
Speaker
And now everything you search for starts with the AI thing at the top. And I'm like, that AI answer could be useful in the right situation. Because if all these companies are leaning so much into AI, if I ask a question in there, because and I do this all the time, I'm still not going to, I i use Claude a lot, but I still don't open up Claude or Gemini. I hate Google stuff sometimes, but my speaker's probably listening.
00:14:59
Speaker
Hopefully it doesn't start talking. But if I'm actually searching, I usually search in Google, even if it's a specific question I have. And so a lot of those questions probably could be answered by AI, even though I'm still always skeptical of the answers they give me. I'm going to sidetrack again. This episode is going to be a bit of a ramble.
00:15:19
Speaker
I think because of the bad way they were getting at math for a long time like if ah on the old version of the hey Google whatever they were using before Gemini came in with the AI stuff the if you asked it a math question it would just like whatever it could do it right and then now ai is terrible at math but because i guess it was so bad for so long now anytime you ask it just a simple thing it could be an addition right and i'm just asking it like a large edition because i don't feel like doing it i like seven numbers that i just want to go through quickly
00:15:51
Speaker
And I don't want to go look for a calculator, whatever. I just ask it out loud. And every time it's like, Oh, I've gotten much better at my math skills lately and says it was something else. And so to be able to answer this question, we need to do this. And it breaks the question down. Like if you're asking it a simple multiplication or a simple addition, it breaks. It just repeats back to you what you said, and then it gives you the answer. And I'm like, this is the most frustrating user experience of my life. And I feel like I'm getting the same thing now with the search results where it's giving me ai answers when I don't want them. And it's frustrating again, because Google traditionally has been so good at knowing user intent and maybe now that they're doing that, they're going to learn when users want the ai answer and when they don't. And it just, it needs to be part of the process.
00:16:42
Speaker
I don't think that's actually what's going on. I think that's just this feature that's now getting added into there and we're stuck with it. I hope not, but I think that's probably what's going on. And it's not only a Google, right? Like my wife is so mad in the Instagram search that the search isn't just a search now. It's like an Ask AI and search at the same time. And it just drives her insane because it's terrible now.
00:17:06
Speaker
And it's not it's everywhere, right? It's so prevalent that they're just cramming in these tools that aren't very good and don't give users what they want But they all think they need them to be in there because the investors want them to be there I guess I don't really know what else why else they'd be doing it um Because yeah, the user experience it does not match with the integration of them and it's gonna get better over time whatever but I ah Yeah, I'm hoping Google gets better at that. and That all started because I was saying you can Google something when you need to know what it is. i As I was talking near the end there, I was just thinking, like I don't remember how we got here and I don't remember even what I started off talking about. We're going to circle back now.
00:17:48
Speaker
I do apologize that we're this is a bit of a rambly episode, but if you don't mind it, let me know in the in the comments um or if it's on YouTube comments, if you're listening on the podcast or a podcatcher or whatever, just um message me on on one of the social platforms to let me know. But ah for now, I've gone completely off track and I don't remember what to say.
00:18:15
Speaker
But yes, so when it comes to knowing about features, just try and keep a pulse of what's going on so that when you need those things because you went into a problem or there's something you've been doing for a long time that you don't feel like is the right way of doing it, maybe you'll know that there is a newer, better way of doing it.
00:18:33
Speaker
ah Or something that at least is on the way and there's so much going on right now. It's crazy ah But also know that like a lot of the features that maybe were very exciting that you heard about and you're like I can't use it because a browser support browser supports pretty good now for a lot of those things right like has sub grid I can't think of any others off the top of my head even layers like you can use layers now in production probably I've seen them used in in production and And so probably is yes, you can ah do check because it's not perfect But it's getting pretty good and all of these things that had been coming out are are very good now So ah do keep an eye on that as well.
Conclusion and Reassurance
00:19:11
Speaker
And then just in terms of how do I keep up with it? I will let you know I holding off all the way to the end here, but ah the main things I try and do to be aware of what's happening is are following people in the different DevRel teams. There's all the Google DevRels, Yuna, Brahmas, and Adam that I follow because they're always sharing everything. like When it's coming in in beta, when something comes out behind a flag, other things like that. and Then there's Jen Simmons, um whom following over at the Safari team, who's always sharing the release notes and other stuff that
00:19:47
Speaker
are going on and more ah you know the stuff that's in early works and stuff over on Safari and with WebKit and then I just look at browser release notes a lot so every time a new version of the browser comes out I just go through and look at the new stuff if you want to be keeping up with things as they're coming out because you know you can't use them anyway just keep up with the latest release notes and if you want to know things that are being worked on then you can look at like the the Canary and Technical Preview and Firefox Nightly release notes. and Then you'll know sort of the new things that are in the works and that will be coming. and Then if you really want to be cutting-edge, again, following a lot of people within the CSS space on social media is a good start ah because people talk about these things. and By following people involved in the working group, there often there's Rachel Andrews, she's with Google now too, but she shares a lot.
00:20:42
Speaker
um after different meetings happen of just some, you know, if if something interesting comes up during the meetings, Tab Atkins will share things that come up. ah So yeah, keeping an eye on that if you want to be like way ahead of what's even been implemented into the spec or the things that are going on within yeah the other conversations and different things that are coming in going on as something is in like the very drafts.
00:21:09
Speaker
as things are in like the draft stages of the spec. So yeah, different things to keep your, you know, if you depending on what what level you want to follow things at. But in general, I would recommend just keep up with the release notes. If you see a cool feature or you see some interesting things, look them up really fast. Or a lot of the time these days with the release notes, there's links to articles that talk about how those things work.
00:21:32
Speaker
and what they do. And again, don't memorize them, play around with something if it seems really cool, but just to be aware of the different things that are possible and then you can use them when they come out. So don't feel like you need to keep up because that's an impossible task. And again, that's just CSS and then there's JavaScript and there's still sometimes stuff in HTML and then there's your framework that's getting updated and everything else that's always going on. So keeping a pulse of things I think is the best thing you can do. And As long as you can do your day-to-day job, then you know enough and you're fine. So don't worry about it too much. ah So yeah, I hope you don't mind today's ramble a little bit. It was definitely more off topic than I normally go and I tend to ramble at times. So I hope you enjoyed it. And with that, I will say thank you very much for listening. And of course, until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.