I had my first experience with Google Wave today. A colleague and I used it for brainstorming, for which we found it very well suited. Once we’d wrapped up, we migrated what we had to our internal wiki, making it a part of the company’s resources. The ability to have multiple people simultaneously edit a […]
Early in my career, I decided I was going to build a web site to compete with one that I used, but had some problems with. It seemed like something I could pull off part time, while continuing with my full-time job. At the time, I had little idea of how much work it would […]
I’m in the process of changing jobs. After 5+ years working with Lockheed Martin, I’m moving to Mark Logic. The process of finding a new company gave me a topic to discuss here. I interviewed with two companies, and both required something I hadn’t been asked to do before: complete a project as part of […]
I came across an interesting little gotcha today while working with CSS’ adjacent sibling selectors. First, a quick intro, in case you’re not familiar with them. <div class=”content”> <h1>Big News</h1> <p>Intro paragraph.</p> <p>Meaningless drivel</p> </div> Sibling selectors let you apply styles to an element based on what it’s next to, rather than the usual way […]
When you start a project, one of the early choices you need to make is what technologies to use. You use tools that will support your efforts, not get in your way. For Trovz.com, I went with PHP on the server side. Over time, I added CakePHP, and I adopted jQuery for client-side work. I […]
Trovz.com taught me that it’s important to get some core users early. But how do you get them, and how do you make use of them? First things first: what does a core group of early users do for you? First, users will tell you what’s wrong with your site. (Or if they don’t, they’ll […]
While I’m preparing my next post, here’s a little something to chew on: Scripting languages allow much obfuscation but the job gets done. Haiku is easy: 5-7-5 syllables. Let’s see yours in the comments.
I’ve always known that the visual aspect of software is important, but most of my software development career has been building behind-the-scenes components that no user ever saw. I knew good user interface design was important, I just didn’t know how to design one. Not knowing anything about web development when I started, I began […]
It’s very difficult to start up a company part time. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s tough. This simple equation popped into my head earlier: Productivity = Skill * Commitment * Tools Early in our effort, we actually did pretty well on the Commitment part of the equation. Four of us developers […]
In April 2007, I started work on what became Trovz.com, a site to help people lend, rent, and buy stuff. On August 19th, 2009, I threw in the towel. I think my first lesson came even before I got started on this idea: the value of an honest friend. I’d previously worked with a guy, […]