My name is Richard Lindsey. I’ve spent the better part of my life living in Austin, TX, and have had a passion for programming ever since junior high, which was a really long time ago.

I took on web development as a hobby in 2005,  and it sparked into a career for me. I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of really smart people over there years, and have learned a lot from educational osmosis, just by being around them. I’ve learned a lot more by becoming a master of dredging the internet for nuggets of wisdom, and I’ve learned even more by simply diving head first into the code.

In recent years, I’ve started to specialize a lot more in front-end development, specifically. As much as I thought I knew couple of years ago, I realize now that I knew nothing, and I’m sure a couple of years from now I’ll come to the same realization about my current level of expertise. If there’s one thing you can’t afford to do in this industry, it’s rest on your laurels. With that in mind, I started this blog for 2 reasons.

There’s a real dearth of actual qualified front-end engineers in the world today. There are plenty of javascript developers, but the ones that actually take it beyond the level of a hobbyist are few and far between. I don’t know if this is because of an acceptance of crappy code that allows it to persist, or a failure to recognize that the code a lot of people write is poorly organized, rarely scalable, bloated and highly inefficient. Maybe it’s more of an apathetic mindset towards front-end development in general, because for a long time, javascript was the redheaded stepchild of the web development stack, and for a long time after that, it was more of an afterthought in site development.

Whatever the case may be, javascript is more and more becoming a first-class citizen of the programming community. With packages like Grunt and Node, javascript is now moving out of the browser and onto the server, either serving up sites in general, serving as a middle-tier/proxy layer on top of some other back-end technology, or integrating directly into our workflow as developers. With the Johnny Five project, it’s even gaining the ability to directly control our hardware.

I, for one, welcome our new Javascript Overlords.

The main driving force behind me creating this blog is to add yet another resource for front-end developers in search of best practices, tips, tricks, hints, fundamentals, you name it. I have no particular intended audience. You’ll find articles ranging from beginner to advanced concepts, along with the occasional internal reflections, which leads me to the other point of this blog.

I intend for this to be a place not only for other people to learn, but for me to document my own growth as an engineer. All of us have had those moments where we look back on something we wrote (sometimes, not even all that long ago), and thought to ourselves “what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that?” This will serve as a chronicle as my own continuing education, as well as forcing me to continue to learn in order to crank out new posts for any visitors.

Welcome to “Conquering the Client,” I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitstaff 😀