The long road

It's been quite a long road in my studies so far. Six months ago was when I began learning how to program, and wrote my first script to Secret Santa-ing in Ruby. Three months later, I began working at Animoto as their first Software Engineer intern, taking a chair behind front-end development to refine my skills in html, css, and javascript. After many long days (and to many coming!) I was offered a full time position at Animoto as a front end software engineer. I love my job, and moving to programming and the tech field can easily be suggested as one of the better decisions that's been made in the last few years.

As of now, I don't have much to say about hustling. I'm exhausted, yet in a blissful way, and I think my tech talk from work says it best (beware, it looks like ass in anything but webkit).

Starting in January, we're going to see some changes to the blog that basically got my career rebooted. For one, I'm moving in the direction of data. Thomson Nguyen introduced me to data and R a few weeks ago after my interests moved into the direction of "I want answers for these things," and a handful of coworkers sent data analysis and visualization books to read. The blog content, of course, will now be targeting what I learn over the next year as I hope to make a name for myself this new area of focus. It feels like a good fit--it offers a chance to expose creativity in data manipulation, as well as expressing a passion of data design and modeling. So, I suppose, more on this next year.

Another focus and hope is to move the blog off blogger and over to Wordpress, or rewrite it in more dynamic CMS. This is from a love/hate relationship with blogger. After managing a complete re-haul of the Animoto blog, I'd like to take advantage of what's out there and make something that fits me much more and should (hopefully) be easier to maintain. So, soon we'll be saying goodbye to this monospace font and poor design and trading it in for something more desirable.

Finally, in January, there'll be a four-week feature about computer literacy in public school, including lesson plans that, ideally, would fit best in a classroom that address literacy, like an English classroom. This was something that's been in the back of my mind since I really started getting the hang of reading and writing code, and is a great opportunity for all students to be in a foreign literacy scenario before diving into a traditional text. I'll try to design them around 50-minute classes.

Edit: With the sudden influx of IE users, I'm well aware this blog is incredibly ugly in IE6-8. I'm not going to fuss about this now, but will be fixed with the new blog setup--ideally it will be responsive and ready to take 2012 by storm.

Habitual

I had a great idea to develop a simple website that lets you see a sample paragraph with a headline and adjust the various points of typography. I looked around on the internet and didn't see anything so I'll put something together eventually and host it at github pages or the home page.

I think my design aesthetic is improving. It's becoming more apparent what I like and don't like, which is certainly a change from "What is this I don't even--"

Also can't seem to shut off work brain.

Back to "school"

I signed up for the three classes being offered for free by Stanford: Machine Learning, Intro to Artificial Intelligence, and Intro to databases. I started watching the lectures today, even though class doesn't "start" until October 10th.

In other news, my order of Hardboiled Design came in, so I've been digging through that as well as the last two books I am reading on design.

JavaScript learning is slow-moving, but moving, none-the-less. Mostly getting excited about my new job that I start next Monday!

Would love to know if any fellow readers are also taking the online courses that have been publicized on Reddit and Hacker News. I'm pumped for these classes and I hope I can directly apply some of this to my job.

CSS and SVG

While I'm trucking along on the HTML/CSS process (making mockups all day in illustrator, what what!), this link popped up in my twitter feed from Hacker News.

A Farewell to CSS3 Gradients covers the hate in working with gradients, the messy evolution of CSS, and a quick and dirty introduction to SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics. I don't think it's end all solution (with the speed of the internet these days, we might as well just save gradients as pngs), but certainly a suggestible alternative.

Little more work to do tonight, maybe some JavaScript fun if I can get around to it. I promised myself I'd fix a JQuery bug by tonight or tomorrow morning.

Web Designer Wall

I'm a big fan of this website.

While the work week ramps up, this page has been really effective in helping me figure out the more advanced things in css, and in turn, creating some really cool experiences (well, I think they're cool) on the web.

Web Designer Wall

Short Term Goals

Productive day today. Finally decided to play around with the CSS on the blog. It's not quite the way I want it yet, but it's new and much better than what was there originally.

Few more opportunities arose.

Working with my younger brother to fix up the Citations drum and bugle corps website (aka, teaching him what I know so he can ditch Dreamweaver, and prettying up his designs). It's cool so far. I have much less say in the design, but he's appreciating what I've done so far, like balance out the site to a better grid, clean up the CSS and HTML so it's readable, etc, and I've liked what he's put together too.

Completely redesigned on paper CTDJ. I wasn't happy with the final product that I released to them a few weeks ago, so I went back to the notebook. I think this next design will be much more ideal and a lot more modern.

Finally, working on a structural engineering website for a small firm. I'm really excited for this one because the communication has been solid so far. Also have some really nifty ideas--hoping to maintain and preserve the original website while making it look very portfolio-ish.

JavaScript: Finishing chapter 4 of Eloquent. Realized why I had such a hard time to get through it last time--the examples are nice, but so far it's not very applicable to web design, and I don't think the problems are very clear about where the data comes from, especially since some of it is stored on the webpage without you know what it looks like. Ah well, I'll keep moving forward. It's been easier editing and fixing bugs in javascript already written since it's somewhat easy to follow when formatted okay.

Otherwise, counting eggs sounds good right now.

Night.

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Something about this banner always bugs me.

I want to fix it.