[tanglisha]

I'm one of the owners of this blog, and genuinely interested in your input on the font size. I don't have great vision, and tend to browse everything at 110-120%, depending on the site. Is your complaint the specific pixel size, or do you think we should have used a different measurement?

As for the developer argument, the problem is that there is no hard line. How big of a project must one complete before they're a developer? You said even a small one, but Hello World is a small "project" and certainly isn't enough.

I completely agree that there is a difference between learning to code and calling yourself a developer. One problem here is that the industry uses developer, coder, and programmer interchangeably, although programmer seems to be currently falling out of favor. (I was once at a party where someone thought that I meant I was a "party programmer" or something.) Obviously they don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of like arguing over the difference between a geek and a nerd at this point.

[mmatants]

I wonder if the real litmus test is "ship a project and talk to the satisfied customer after fixing a few production bugs". Arbitrarily I'd say that the project would be at least a couple weeks personal time investment at least, and then also maybe a month of follow-up for bugs. And by "talk" I mean even just indirectly be part of a team to sign off on a project as done.

An experience like that really affects one's coding habits and makes them structure things in a more future-proof way: things like having loggable errors, even basic usability sense cannot realistically come from anywhere but hearing real user reports, going through the most basic deployment process, finding an issue on a live system.

In addition, certain naive over-engineering impulses get tempered by real shipping experience - because YAGNI is honed as well.

It's been described that anyone creative/constructive plays both a "writer/implementer" role and an "editor" role (using a book analogy here). Writing code is what we learn in school - but editing and directing and culling that output is something that takes real exposure to user problems to get better at.

[danso]

Thanks for replying...the 13px size is the main issue...i don't have great vision but I don't think any recent design guide would argue at 13 px is suitable in today's design standards.

One other metric is letters per line...guidelines recommend roughly 70 to 80 characters, because as lines get wider, it's harder to track which line you were on when your eyes go from the end to the beginning of the next line. It looks like your site is at around 100 characters despite it not having an extremely wide article body size.

Anyway, just my rant...this post on typography I've found to be useful: http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/typographic-choices/

As for what kind of project makes a developer, well, that's definitely open for discussion. I have no idea, but was just looking for a litmus test beyond just learning or being interested in code.

[tanglisha]

Thanks for your input. I have access to a typography nerd and will ask for a recommendation :)