Blogs

I saw the best minds of my generation… writing spam filters. Neal Stephenson, Solve For X

Day 6 at MakerSquare. Week 2. This time, I’m in a new building, which is really the old building. The atmosphere is different, but that might just be the absence of glass walls and paint fumes. Upsides: standing desk and a coffee maker.Downsides: one bathroom for 20+ dudes and too much coffee. Back-end now happens in the morning, which is the opposite of last week. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse [but it’s probably neither - “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them”]. Dug deep into Ruby classes with my new pair. Seeing as I’m writing this after catching up on the morning’s work [at 2245], maybe we dug too deep. If we hadn’t though, I wouldn’t have learned that the ‘puts’ method looks for a custom 'to_s’ method in classes, and print that output as opposed to the unreadable-by-human object! My notes from that moment read as, “implicit class methods to make objects readable?! mind blown!” ...

Start of my redesign for Austin Books & Comics. A matter of getting the content in, taking care of some non-critical bugs, and building out the rest of the pages. Not pictured: nifty expanding ‘store’ hours bar revealing the actual store hours

An oldie but a goodie, particularly applicable over the next nine weeks. Probably will need to bust this out every Friday. 

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts. http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/ This is news to me.

Day 5 at MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. & also project day. Front-end: Pick a website and redesign it. I had originally picked the site for my favorite diner in town, Kerbey Lane. Excellent pancakes, cluttered website. It was correctly suggested that the scope of that redesign would be too much. I then picked another local institution, Austin Books & Comics. I started by sketching out some mockups and jumped in. No good. No good at all. ...

Day 4 at MakerSquare. Started with explanations of why and how things happen here, which is always awesome. I like to understand thought processes and how decisions are made, especially related to design [speaking in the broadest sense of the word]. We were reminded of the Three Pillars to be instilled in us: teamwork, independence, and a love of problem solving. All noble qualities. This reminds me - I need to see if there’s a Twitter account that automatically sends out quotes from Stoic philosphers. If not, well, I’ll add it to the to-do list. ...

The gist pointed out that Hash.new, with its default values, is good for implementing Fibonacci sequences. So I decided to check: fib = Hash.new do |hash,key| k = key.to_i hash[key] = case k when 0 then 0 when 1 then 1 else hash[k-1] + hash[k-2] end end This recursive (and memoized!) definition means that you can do fib[18] and get back 2584, plus you get the Fibonacci numbers from F0 (fib[0]) to F17 (fib[17]). Recursively defined Hashes are useful auto-memoized structures. ...

Day 3 at MakerSquare. A pun-y morning with wireframing and CSS layout. Looking back at the web design I’ve done in the past [which involved a vicious amount of Googling about <div> and floats and inline-blocks], I’m excited about developing the skillz to quickly iterate on designs I’ve sketched out. No more sweating over how the introduction of a new paragraph could break the layout. They say that by suffering with manual CSS layout, we will develop a greater appreciation for frameworks. Without having touched a single one of them, I can confirm that yes, frameworks are awesome. ...

Day Two at MakerSquare. First full day of class. Front end in the morning: Mostly stretching the HTML/CSS muscles and practicing pair programming. Realized that float:left and float:right size the element down to the width of the child element - light bulb! Starting to scratch the surface of best practices, from using “-u” in the initial git push to writing in the present tense for git messages. And, enjoyably, making the Sublime Text experience even more awesome by tweaking settings and learning shortcuts. ...