Collaborative Web Development

Chapter 1. Introduction

I learned to be a web developer by working alone. It started when I was a high school student in the mid-1990s and had the idea for a website. I spent a lot of free time, in a spare bedroom at my parents’ house, copy and pasting HTML snippets that I found by clicking View → Source in my web browser. In college, I majored in Multimedia Art, which required two programming classes. I took the classes, working on the required projects alone in my dorm room. After college, I took a break from the web to manage a bookstore and spend time teaching, but a few years later my love of web development was rekindled. When this happened, I re-entered the world of development through independent learning with books and tutorials, eventually doing independent contracting. It wasn’t until several years into my career that I partnered with another developer on a project.

Now, my experience of solitude may be a bit extreme, but I imagine that many of you reading this also got your start working alone. Development is typically first learned as a deep-thinking and independent activity, yet in the workforce it is a highly social endeavor. As professional web developers, we often partner with other developers to build complex systems. To do this, we review and critique one another’s code, come to common understandings, make compromises, write documentation, and interact with open source in ways that we were unable to do as solo learners.

Our Responsibility

The intent of this ...