[hinkley]

We had a lead who wanted to do front-end code but hated HTML. He really, really wanted us to use something where he could pretend he wasn't writing HTML. But AJAX was the big thing, our app required a lot of interactive HTML, and CSS3 was just on the radar.

He would mark stories as done that had tons of layout problems. He just couldn't be arsed to dig into it, because you actually had to stick your whole arm into the guts to get things to work. Between me and another guy who were doing 60% of the interactions and north of 80% of the bugfixes we finally browbeat him into going back to real HTML templates. He retreated to writing mostly backend code from then on, which honestly reduced our workload by itself.

Pretending you have a different set of core problems than you actually have has never ended well for me, and I'm convinced it has never ended well for anyone else either. Don't abstract away your problem domain, and don't kid yourself about what your problem domain is.

[markmiro]

I think layout is a big hurdle for no-code tools. I also think it's going to get solved. But until then, I think you really gotta dig into HTML and CSS and understand them well to get things to work properly.

"Don't abstract away your problem domain"

I dunno. I tend to think of it as getting good at what you do, then finding the rules, then taking those patterns and making a company out of it where those patterns are built-in to the product.