Page 1 of 1

Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:25 pm
by MiniMonty
Hi all,

I suppose, if I'm asking "am I out of my depth" then I already am but I'll go on...

I took on a project recently from an ad asking for "php, Flash, css and any other related skills".
Working from home, flexi hours - very nice.
I was honest about it and said "Flash - 9/10, php - 6/10 and css 2/10 but keen to learn more.

So I'm given access to the server (it's a codeigniter framework which has thrown me a little but not too bad),
I open the main .css to find it's 4320 lines !

Is it me or is that a little excessive ?

So now I'm struggling with every manoeuvre trying to find the javascript in one folder, the .css in another, making "controllers" that seem to do
nothing more than redirect to the page "view" file that I actually want to work on and then finding that everything I make looks
inconsistent because I can never find the right styling element in the .css !!!

Just a rant really - does anyone here use codeigniter - is there a one liner that sums up the secret to making sense of
a system which (to me) seems to just breaks up loads of code and then stick it back together at runtime ?

Best wishes
Monty

Re: Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Sat Jul 10, 2010 2:11 pm
by josh
Work is work, right? Its not code ignitor's fault sounds like the previous programmer had a "screw it" attitude. You can either try to make it better, or adopt the same "screw it" attitude. Its always fun to try to do the former even if you don't care about the project. Its good "exercise" to try to fix it. I'd try to find some tools that help me locate parts of the CSS not in use, and try to first of all organize the CSS according to which page in the application it corresponds with. That should give a pretty good start to the long organization task in front of you. If you just take a "screw it" attitude it will be good pay but you won't end up happy and you may feel like you wasted your potential in hindsight.

Re: Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2010 2:24 am
by matthijs
Do you use Firebug? With Firebug it's very easy to locate the styles of every element. It shows exactly which lines in which CSS files do what to each element, which rules are overruled, etc

Re: Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2010 8:35 am
by DaveTheAve
Sounds like instead of the good practice of having multiple css files loaded when needed, they mashed them ALL up into one the is constantly sent to the viewer.

Perhaps it's THAT long because of javascript required css too. Such as Jquery's UI; instead of having a seperate file: jquery-ui.css perhaps they merged it in the main... or something similar (Don't know if jquery was actually used)

If so, perhaps make seperate css files for such to try to cut it down; if there is css from javascript if the javascript isn't being used at all in the app, perhaps remove it completely.

Re: Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2010 4:26 pm
by josh
matthijs wrote:Do you use Firebug? With Firebug it's very easy to locate the styles of every element. It shows exactly which lines in which CSS files do what to each element, which rules are overruled, etc
My IDE lets me jump from method to method too (in my PHP code). Should I write my whole program using only one class then too? ;-)

Re: Am I out of my depth ?

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 9:37 am
by jason
Welcome to the world of web development!

What you are experiencing is common with any new project. I'm fairly slow when joining a project. Everything is done wrong, and how could they possibly have done it that way!? 6-months later, and I'm wondering why the new guy is having problems. =)

Give it time. Just fix things as you find them, and try to leave the code in better shape then when you left it.