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One of the things I’ve appreciated most with Scroll Magazine, has been the opportunity to get to know some of our speakers better, particularly some of the things you might not necessarily know about them.

This week we’re featuring an interview with Stephanie Rewis, a long time contributor through books, blog posts, workshops and presentations to the Web. Keep an eye out for my interview with Steph, and more in coming weeks.

Q: What made you decide you could do this for a living?

A: I’ve always had an interest in how the brain works and it seemed logical to introspect, identify my innate skills, and find a career that utilized those. I love puzzles, research, and detective work. I believe life is about continual learning. I didn’t know much about code, but thought it might make use of those abilities.

After taking an HTML class, I was interested, but decided I would rather learn at my own speed. I did tutorials 15 hours a day for the first year. I got friends to let me build websites for them (you don’t know what you don’t know until you try things). I joined a mailing list and obsessively asked questions. As my questions were answered, I asked harder questions and answered the easier ones from new folks.

As time went on, I was doing more answering than asking. Business owners who planned to build their own site then found it to be harder than they anticipated would contact me offlist and ask what I would charge to build it for them. And that’s when I realized I could do this for a living. People helped me and asked nothing in return, I passed that knowledge on to others, and I never did any marketing. Starting my business was organic.

Q Have you ever coded live on stage, or in front of an audience? How did it go?

A Oh yes. I used to code on stage all the time. But for me, writing code at my desk as opposed to writing it in front of an audience uses different brain modalities. When you’re nervous, you may not notice a typo, a missing semi-colon, etc. And then you can’t see it and the audience has to help you figure out why it isn’t working. It’s a little nerve-wracking.

Over time, I’ve tried different methods of showing code. Sometimes I’ve commented code out in chunks and then uncommented bit by bit while explaining it and showing what it does. Nowadays, I lean more toward making a movie of writing and showing it and then talking through it while it plays, which also saves time from bouncing between Keynote and a browser.

Q How do you further develop and extend your skills? Books, courses? Noodling by yourself?

A I stay pretty busy these days, so I find myself doing more reading of blogs and articles by people I trust (many times discovered via my RSS reader — Twitter). If I’m searching for specific information, I limit my search parameters to the past year. If a site doesn’t put a date on their posts, I get highly irritated and disregard their information. Web information is not timeless. Things change at a rapid pace. When I get books, I tend to cherry pick the information I read rather than doing a cover to cover read.

Q Is it better to learn HTML then CSS then JavaScript, or JavaScript then HTML then CSS, or all three at once, or something else?

A They work as a team. HTML — or good, accessible, semantic markup — should be the root of all things. You should understand what markup is appropriate to use in specific circumstances. HTML is the only one in the group that could stand alone if needed. If your JS and CSS were turned off, your HTML should look like a nice logical outline with headings, lists, and paragraphs.

CSS is, of course, used for all styling. As CSS has become much more powerful, it’s best for performance reasons to create animations and transitions using CSS instead of JS. More than likely, if you can do it with CSS, you probably should.

JS is used to enhance the experience. And in the true spirit of progressive enhancement, content should be available without it. Maybe it won’t be as sexy, but the user doesn’t miss important things. To me, this is sadly missing in many JS frameworks today. And newer web developers don’t seem to understand why that’s not a good thing, and they don’t attempt to make their sites accessible.

Q What’s the best way to get more women coding?

A That’s a loaded question, isn’t it? I’ve heard a lot of good ideas about making our work environment more conducive to keeping women, and I think those are great. But quite honestly, I think the root issue is far deeper. It begins with the media and our culture. Where are the amazing geek role models on TV shows (yes, there are a slim few lately)? What is held up to girls as important when they’re young? Is it being smart, or is it being thin and beautiful?

What if we put less influence on the Kardashians — women who have achieved nothing but a lot of plastic surgery and media attention — and more on women who have made really amazing technical and scientific achievements? What if we made being smart sexy? I believe that attracting young women to our industry starts with changing the expectations put on them as a culture.

Q Frameworks. What’s your take? Are they good, bad or does it depend on how you use them?

A In the case of JS frameworks, I strongly believe you should be well- grounded in plain vanilla JS and progressive enhancement. Then, if you choose to use a framework, yes, use it smartly and accessibly.

In the case of CSS frameworks — I have strong opinions since I’ve used some and written one. I found in using a couple over the years that they tended to be overbloated and far more than I would write myself. I either didn’t need a good bit of what they included, or I needed to change and override so much of it that it became even bigger. It’s hard to be all things to all sites that might want to use your framework.

That said, I lead the CSS framework we’ve written for the Salesforce Lightning Design System. We work hard to start with reusable micro- patterns and to only write what we actually need. We have the luxury of writing for our specific enterprise ecosystem. It’s not meant to be a generic, “use it for everything” framework. So while some people using our framework may override the branding colors (via tokens or variables), in the end, most want their components to look like the new Salesforce Lightning experience. It’s a great time-saver for both internal and external developers building on our platform.

Q Tabs or spaces?

A I could barely care less than I do. When I was doing a lot of contracting for agencies, I regularly switched my editor to output whatever they preferred. Our team currently uses spaces (I had to look at my preferences to tell you that. LOL). I set the translate_tabs_to_spaces to “true” and then I never think about it again. There are other things I’m more passionate about — like the code that follows those tabs or spaces.

Q What’s on your horizon?

A In five years, Greg and I will be taking off on Amritha, our Lagoon 400 catamaran, to circumnavigate the globe for 8-10 years. Until then, I’m absolutely loving my role at Salesforce. It’s a place where I’m well- supported as a human and encouraged to continually learn, grow, share, and lead. I can’t think of a better, more challenging role to work in until we exit.

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