Back in the "golden age" of Web my development career, circa 2008, before "full-stack" and before SPAs, we were fortunate to have people that specialized in UX and CSS. They understood fonts, colors, spacing, browser quirks, and they understood CSS. They have their own conferences and bloggers that they followed. (Eric Meyer) They were technical enough to deal with a Git repo and commit css and image files. The back-end / "CS major" types could simply focus on the CRUD part of the application and didn't have to care about UI or CSS.

Some "pros" can't do it either, see MacOS Tahoe

your youtube links have tracking ?si parameters in them

I just opened my YouTube app, searched the videos and copied the links.

I don't know anything about tracking.

Ah, I always figured those were tracking. Glad to see my suspicions confirmed.

*Linus

Sorry, you're right. I've edited it.

skill issue

Many people very much cannot cook because they have poor kitchen skills (or even none at all).

"Anyone should be able to follow a recipe" is far from reality, especially since the vast majority of recipes are not written for the kitchen illiterate.

Nobody is born with "kitchen skills" whatever that means. You have to spend some time learning it, and everybody can do that. Trying to explain chopping onions as "kitchen skills" is just running away from the challenge.

Jumping to conclusions about what "kitchen skills" means aside, the fact that nobody is born with them is precisely the point. Congratulations, you understood it!

Slightly less facetiously, "anyone can follow a recipe" makes about as much sense as "anyone can follow a README". Is it some arcane black magic that only a select few can decipher? No, but at the same time if you don't recognise that there is a baseline level of technical literacy needed to actually follow your average README then you might have your head stuck too far in a bubble.

Following a readme on a github project is obviously a very technical skill and conflating it with following a cooking recipe where the complexity level is around "chop onions" is a strawman, I haven't claimed such.

Cooking is very much a technical skill, much more so than following a readme to install and set up some end-user-targeting project or other. I've seen too many flat-out horrendous meals from people who self-describe as "knowing how to cook" to be convinced otherwise.

Have you looked at a typical recipe recently? Here's an example (https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/oriental-egg-fried-rice) from the "quick and easy" section of BBC Good Food, a site that's regularly in the first page of search results for various recipes. Never mind that it expects you to have procured cooked chicken breasts from somewhere (and oh boy are those easy to turn into a bland, dry, rubbery mess if you don't know what you're doing)...do you honestly think there is no room in those instructions for someone who does not already know how to cook to screw it up?

Here's a recipe (https://urbanfarmie.com/instant-pot-jollof/) for a more complex dish that I am intimately familiar with, which is how I can tell you for absolutely free that if you just "follow the recipe" as described you will very easily end up with a soggy mess at best and burnt rice at worst.

Or - since you seem to like patting yourself on the back about onions - the next time you're following a recipe and it tells you to "sweat" or to "caramelise" onions or "sauté until golden", maybe spare a thought for how likely it is that someone who is actually new to the kitchen will get the correct result.

>Cooking is very much a technical skill, much more so than following a readme to install and set up some end-user-targeting project or other

Talk about bubbles

That's a wonderful way to dodge the point entirely, keep it up!

Cooking is so easy, everyone who has hands, can read a book and a clock can do it. Start with eggs or pancakes, work your way up from there.

My kids learned to cook from age 9. Now everyone can cook in this household.

I can’t take any adult who says it’s hard seriously, especially since I grew up in a culture where I heard a myriad of excuses from ‘manly man’ who think of it as a woman’s job.

It’s lame and it says a lot about them.

That's an interesting analogy. I can't make proper UI but I can cook fine so maybe I should learn more about UI.

Any good source of design recipe to share?

Refactoring UI is a well known book for learning about design as a developer [0]. It's co-written by Adam Wathan of Tailwind even before he made Tailwind. Steve Schoger, the other author, refactors UIs on YouTube [1] which you can take a look at too, lots of good tips there and he talks through each one and visually shows you what changes and why.

[0] https://www.refactoringui.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/steveschoger

This would be my exact recommendation.

Thanks, I'll give it a look.

I think the guy you responded to was making a joke. "skill issue" for Linus Torvalds.

This is a different problem and disciplin. I'm not an artist. I can't design anything pretty. But I can learn a programming language (or CSS) well enough that I can replicate something an artist designs.

We have an entire design org that produces pretty UIs. FE developers are then expected to know the CSS rules to build that design.

The very first thing I teach new FE developers is how to build from Figma designs.

IMO, this particular division of labor (design/specification) introduces a rather unacceptable level of friction.

It is a feature, not a bug, that when the design and specification work is being done by the same person, the designs tend to be ones that are relatively straightforward to specify. It makes it a conscious choice to budget more specification effort towards elments that are more important to the designer.