Another Certification, Another Class, Another Layout

I’ve earned another certification.   As part of my commitment to continuing education and stay on top of my field, I take many classes.  Some of those, are more than just classes because all the ground the cover.  Sometimes they are courses.  When I complete these courses, Often I earn a certificate so that I can prove to others I’m qualified in this particular subject.  Or at least I’m proving that I took the course…

This one is about SASS.  SASS is a preprocessed language where a Developer enters a lot of code in a language that seems a lot like CSS (because it is).  Yes our community has struck again and let business types name one of technologies.  And of course, that business man chose a word that is already being used to name one of our other technologies. That one, is an Acronym, S.a.a.S.  aka “Software as a Service”.  Love it or hate or even be perplexed as to why it needed a name other than “Subscription Model Pricing”.  This SASS is a language that is similiar to CSS (the language that Developers talk about colors, fonts, position and other styling points for elements on a web page.

Speaking of our community it seems we also liked to start traveling down the road of inventing things that we probably shouldn’t just to make ourselves like we know some fancy technology  (like SASS) that literally gives little to no advantage or benefit over the existing technology.  Sass doesn’t replace CSS, there’s no additional amount of styling that you can do with SASS that you can’t with CSS.  So what does it do?  The same thing a lot of the things that other compiled languages do.  It allows us to write code in a specific language, then compile it using a compiler (which we all get to together and have meetings about which is best and how we should install it on the server, which server, which version of Sass, which version of the package manager etc. Then  that compiler takes everything we output and . . .  wait for it . . .   writes a CSS file with the info the Developer provided it.  Just like regular CSS.

Sure in some really big apps that will make a lot of new page templates that are customizable or etc might benefits from the few strokes per thousand we save writing SASS instead of CSS.  Yes some of us might benefit a little from the additional organization methods it used to format it’s code.  But most of us will either feel validated that they can write all the extra code at the end of the day or feel used because they went through all those extra steps to do what they normally just do.