Articles

If you want to advance your career, it's important to demonstrate leadership. How can you take up the mantle without being selected for a new role at work first?

You're the newcomer to an existing team. Maybe they've been together a long time and you're just stepping in, or a new team is forming for a project and you've been selected.

It can take a while to find your place on a team. What is your role, and how does that translate into the daily activities and interactions you will have? What expectations do your teammates have of you, and what are yours of them? How can you quickly become a productive member of the team and feel like you're in the right place?

What kind of team are you joining?

Websites can be produced with a huge variety of technology, and leverage different aspects of the browser and network. However, they all share the protocols and constraints of sending an html file over http.

Today, developers are musing over whether to ditch jquery completely in favor of new javascript frameworks like react and vue. New developers are often not taught the old ways and old developers question how long the new ones will be around.

In this constantly changing environment, how do you choose whether to adopt something new or go with tried and true?

A website is a communication platform. It's purpose is to represent, explain, convince, or sell you something. People come to it with interests and expectations, and a good website design anticipates and serves these needs.

Naming things is one of the hardest things in computer science. This is because it involves collaborating with other people and detailed semantics.

When you are building an api in tandem with developing an application, changes to the schema need to be implemented in both places. This can mean that the changes need to be coordinated across teams or in different languages. For projects in production, deploying these together can become quite sensitive.

Your website runs on Linux, why not develop on it?

Windows kinda sucks for LAMP development, and OSX is ok, but different than setting up a real server. Linux is not only extremely fast to configure for development, it also runs virtualized environments like virtualbox and docker faster than the other systems. By using Linux for local development, you can learn how to configure a web server while working on it locally, or run a vm as fast as possible, without the lameware bottleneck.

How do you come up with a great design? There are many aspects that have to work well on their own and look even nicer when put together.

Process

Designers approach a project by breaking down the various design aspects and then working with the team to define what fits the client's desire.

Here are some major components that are considered as part of a design:
Color, typography, layout.

By making good choices in these areas, you can assemble some great looking pages and components.

HTML/CSS

This is what a web page is made of. Using these tools, you can compose well designed pages with rich content in it. Web technology is all about compiling HTML and CSS (and some Javascript) and sending it to your browser.

HTML is a markup language, which means it's a syntax for marking up content. For example, this text is in a paragraph HTML element, which looks like this: <p>Hello this is a paragraph element, often referred to as a "p tag"</p>. You can see the opening and closing tags, which specify the type of element, and the content in between.

Tracking your time and submitting hours on time is important for getting paid.

There are additional benefits to accurate time tracking, like making better estimates for your work.

With more clarity around where your time goes, you can see which areas of a project demand more of it.

Record your time as it's spent to maximize accuracy. I use a tool like Toggl to get that done.

Work with your team to clarify the buckets of time you should be tracking against. If everyone puts their time in differently, it's hard to make sense of it at the end.