Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Developer’s Block

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 at 1:18 am

I’m absolutely frustrated and angry with myself.

If there were ever a thing as Developer’s Block, I’ve got it tonight. It’s unfortunate, I did so well developing yesterday.

To summarize, I had a great idea for a tool around 5:30pm last night. I decided to stay at work and entertain the idea and completed some really awesome development during my 4 hours working on the project. I left the project satisfied with what I’d done, content with my accomplishment. I made a bad mistake of showing my work to my “client” today. While I got a lot of praise and kudos and the satisfaction that what I built as an idea was definitely on the right track, it also opened the requirements up on my project. As I spent the rest of the afternoon wishing I hadn’t shown anyone what I had done, I was also contemplating how to tackle various problems with my primitive technical options.

I came home with certain ideas on how to conquer these problems, I tried various methods, techniques to solve the problems. I have a very strong mindset that “everything is possible” to build. Optimistic eh? But everything is not possible without using standard technologies…Anything is possible with a server-side language and a database but in my scenario, I need to do things with only HTML and JavaScript. I tried to think of any and all possible solutions but unfortunately came up short. I couldn’t solve the problems that plagued me tonight.

And that’s why I’m frustrated. As for why I’m angry with myself…I’m not sure if the problems I’m dealing with are impossible given the tools at my disposal or if I’m not thinking clearly, but I stupidly wasted a lot of time pursuing different options I thought might work only to do a lot of development and fail. I then thought about the problem and my proposed solution and realized it never would have worked in the first place. What was I thinking? Wasting so much time on something because I didn’t think or plan it out thoroughly? Foolish and impulsive. Or possibly desperate.

The tool I built had such high hopes and possibilities but because of my tools, I can’t do what I want and what it should be capable of. It’s so frustrating being limited in this way. I know that if I had access to the things I should: a database and server-side code, I could do my task easily. To spend so much time doing creative workarounds…only to fail…I’m just so frustrated with everything.

I need to take a breather, I’ll stop for tonight with this unsettled feeling. Maybe tomorrow, my mind will be clear, fresh, and I’ll be able to solve the problems that confounded me all night.

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, Development | No Comments »

Developers start counting at 0

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 4:45 pm

So I spent a good hour or so trying to get subcategories to show up on the right panel….
It wasn’t showing up, despite putting in parameter for it (below)…so I thought maybe it was the wordpress code I’d modified. That wasn’t it either.

To show categories, you have to put:
<?php wp_list_categories(‘depth=1‘); ?>

By default, wordpress shows subcategories…so you just have to specify the depth.

So here I’m thinking all categories belong in depth 0
Subcategories belong in depth 1
Subsubcategories belong in depth 2, and so on.

And after of trying to debug this, (and I probably should have done this at the start), I modified depth to 2 and it worked.

So basically,
Categories belong in depth 1
Subcategories belong in depth 2…
and so on.

Man, I feel stupid…but…it’s an honest mistake no? I guess I’m just so used to counting at 0, especially when I see all this code….”who starts counting at 1?” I asked myself…but…the answer is non-developers. But still, this *is* still PHP code…so…man, i dunno.

Anyways. Time wasted….

I need to re-categorize everything. I hate my categories. Can’t find/do anything.

Posted in All Posts, Development, PHP, Site Updates, Web Development | No Comments »

Chrome > Firefox? yes wai.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 8:45 am

After using Firefox for 4+ years, I’ve finally decided after a month that Google Chrome is indeed better. By better, what do I mean?

It’s faster. Quite obvious, FireFox can be REALLY SLOW.
Occasionally FireFox decides to take 50% of your CPU resources for no reason. Maybe that’s just me but it happens at home and at work so I determine through flawless logic that it happens to all of you.
FireFox, once I’ve begun to notice, crashes frequently. Chrome has yet to crash on me during its use.

FireFox > Chrome for 3 reasons:

FireFox Web Developer addons are awesome. Does Chrome has equivalents? I don’t know but should probably find out.
~~Chrome doesn’t seem to refresh files upon “SHIFT REFRESH”. Not a big deal unless you frequently web design and develop. o wait.~~
Edit: It’s CTRL-F5
Chrome has no good FTP extension. My FireFox remains open all the time solely for that.

All 3 reasons are probably/possibly specific only to me.

I’ve tried the FireFox 4 beta. Same stuff. Chrome > FireFox4

I plead with you: Give Chrome a try. Use it for a month. You’ll love it.

If you remain stubborn in your ways, resistant to change, fail to evolve, you’ll fall behind in technology. Next thing you know, you’ll be like your parents.
“I don’t know how to use Windows”
“You can touch a screen now?”
“I just heard of this website, YouTube. You can watch stuff on it.”
And then you go -_-;
Except it’ll be your kids doing -_-; to you! How embarrassing. UNLESS YOU DOWNLOAD, INSTALL, AND USE CHROME!

/best. sales. pitch. evah.

Posted in All Posts, Browsers | 3 Comments »

Finding a good partner for a website…

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 6:39 pm

Note: This is an old draft but with a recent development, so I’m going to post my old draft and add to it.

There are several factors that I look for in a web partner:
1. He/she must be interested in developing in the same language as you.
2. He/she must be of relatively equal skill so that you both learn from each other. You may not be equal in terms of development skill but I believe your skills have to compliment your partner’s so that you both have relatively equal value in the relationship.
3. He/she must be have relatively equal passion regarding the topic the website being developed is for.
4. He/she must be have relatively equal motivation to work on the site, otherwise you have a person doing too much and a person doing too little.

What I believe is that, much like a give and take relationship, things must be fair. It does not mean that every task must be fairly or equally shared but as a whole, both people should compliment each others strengths and weaknesses.

Throughout my entire web career, since the middle/end of high school and still ongoing, I’ve been looking for that partner. Given the requirements above, I imagine it might be harder to find a good web partner than finding a significant other! Or maybe I’m not looking in the right places…

In high school, my friend and I wanted to work on a website together. He was sort of into web, much like me. We talked frequently about it but nothing ever happened. I stopped waiting and eventually did my own stuff.
In university and the same thing happened (with another friend). This time, the guy actually had his own web stuff, he migrated his content over to my already existing hosting…and then, never touched the stuff again O_O
Note that both of these are my good friends whom I’m still close with. The first one moved in to something unrelated to web, the second one is currently doing Microsoft SharePoint stuff.

I guess the first guy didn’t have 1, 2, and 4. The second guy didn’t have 3 and 4.

I gotta say, it’s tough. I’m still looking…there have been a few potential candidates recently but nothing seemed to work out. Maybe I didn’t sell that I was looking well enough…

Anyways, I’m posting this because the first guy, from high school, wants a website built. And as of today, I’m going to work with him on it. He’s not interested in the design or development, he will be the relationship between the business and I. I just found it kind of interesting that about a decade after we originally wanted to work together, we finally are. The stakes are higher this time though, it’s not just children playing, we’re both doing this professionally. But I’m honestly really looking forward to working with my friend professionally on something like this. It’s like doing a high school project together…and I know he’s lacking in 1 but he’s got 2, 3 and 4 and in this dynamic, that’s all I want/need. And because he’s a close friend, I’m eager to really do my best and not let him down and I’m sure is opposite is true.

So I officially have a side project now.

I hope things go smoothly…I might ask this guy for a ride but will asking him for requirements work out? He might ask to borrow a game but will his asking when something will be done sour the friendship? While I agree that mixing professional and unprofessional relationships is a bad idea, we’re both aware of our respective working skills (from high school) and I think we both have that working trust in each other. What really sucks is mixing professional and unprofessional relationships when the unprofessional aspect doesn’t measure up to the professional. Going out for drinks with someone and working with someone are always two completely different things.

/4 (LFM): Sheaman: LF1M WEB DESIGNER/DEVELOPER
/4 (LFM): Sheaman: Must develop in PHP/ASP.NET. Know XHTML/CSS2. jQuery/HTML5/CSS3 a plus. Good Group. U Fail = Boot. /roll for loot. Mainspec > Offspec

(that’s my World of Warcraft version of Looking For 1 More)

Posted in All Posts, Development, Friends, My Life, Work | No Comments »

What’s next (for me in web development)?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 5:54 pm

So, the last few days I’ve learned a couple of things
1. My fundamentals suck. I don’t read any books, other than the ASP.NET one that I’m “currently” reading. I never read any html, asp, css, javascript book or anything. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve learned my entire web career has been self taught or looked up, ie: I look up what I want to do, do it, and learn that “method” and use it elsewhere. For example, if I wanted something to loop, I would look it up.
Learn about for, while, do while. Make my change that needs the loop. And down the road, apply my knowledge to something else.

What this means is
a) I’m strong because I’ve looked a lot of things up.
b) I’m strong because I’m good at thinking outside the box…because I’m able to apply what I know creatively to get something accomplished. And if I can’t think of a solution like that, I look it up and add to my knowledge base.
c) I’m weak at fundamentals. I don’t know the “right way” (by that, I mean, the shortest, most efficient way) to do things because I find creative workarounds to accomplish the same thing. Like when I built a calendar from scratch. A feat in itself but time wasted when I could have used a control or other source code available.
For example: I didn’t know what display: block did. I thought it was just the opposite of display: none. I thought everything was inherently display: block’ed unless you specified display: none, which would hide it. I never learned what display: block was, I just guessed it’s functionality based on some use and the difference between that and display: none.

Conclusion: I will begin my re-education and buy/read some books on: CSS2.
I will learn CSS3 and HTML5 from a book so I get my fundamentals down. From there, I’ll continue learning what/how I currently learn….which brings me to my next point.

2. I’ve often wondered if I should move away from front-end web development and move to back-end. I’m good at both, stronger on front-end (that’s my job). But front-end does get kind boring in the way of “deep” thinking, something I really love. I thought I’d learned enough about front-end to try something more complicated…but because of 1 (above), I realize I’m not as strong as I thought, maybe there’s still room to stay in the front-end side. The thing is, with CSS3 and HTML5, where HTML5 is fundamentally different from HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, there’s still a lot to learn. I imagine HTML5 will bridge the front-end and back-end development sides…but since I don’t know too much about HTML5, I can’t confirm that statement.

Conclusion: I will continue what I’m doing, both front-end and back-end. I will try to learn CSS3 and HTML5 early and decide whether or not it’s enough to satisfy my “deep” thinking. I will start working on something more complicated to fulfill my back-end need…which brings me to my next point.

3. I’m getting bored with warrenshea.com. Not in terms of blogging, but in terms of updating the site, creating themes, in terms of content/difficulty. I’ve launched 2 themes in the last week, I probably should have staggered myself, but there isn’t/wasn’t any challenge in doing my gmail theme. The idea was fun, the design was okay (like always), but the development was tedious. There are 4 themes I want to do still but currently have no motivation to do any of them. They all include a little “quirk” which would make the development interesting…but not interesting enough.

Conclusion: I think I’ll take a break from warrenshea.com for a bit (again, not the blogging aspect). I’m going to spend more nights re-re-re-re-catching up with ASP.NET….and planning the “EPIC SITE” site I want to build.

I know I write that ever 2 months but THIS TIME I MEAN IT :@

Posted in All Posts, ASP.NET, CSS, Development, JavaScript / Java Frameworks, My Life, New Technologies, Web Developer, XHTML | 2 Comments »