new grey whistle test

via CSS Tricks a heart shaped div a single html element with this css: #heart { position: relative;...

Sat, 26 May 2012 14:24:00 -0400

a heart shaped div

a single html element with this css:

#heart { position: relative; width: 100px; height: 90px; } #heart:before, #heart:after { position: absolute; content: “”; left: 50px; top: 0; width: 50px; height: 80px; background: red; -moz-border-radius: 50px 50px 0 0; border-radius: 50px 50px 0 0; -webkit-transform: rotate(-45deg); -moz-transform: rotate(-45deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-45deg); -o-transform: rotate(-45deg); transform: rotate(-45deg); -webkit-transform-origin: 0 100%; -moz-transform-origin: 0 100%; -ms-transform-origin: 0 100%; -o-transform-origin: 0 100%; transform-origin: 0 100%; } #heart:after { left: 0; -webkit-transform: rotate(45deg); -moz-transform: rotate(45deg); -ms-transform: rotate(45deg); -o-transform: rotate(45deg); transform: rotate(45deg); -webkit-transform-origin: 100% 100%; -moz-transform-origin: 100% 100%; -ms-transform-origin: 100% 100%; -o-transform-origin: 100% 100%; transform-origin :100% 100%; }

Download this file to print a fully functional 3-D printer from your 3-D printer....

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:30:00 -0400

Download this file to print a fully functional 3-D printer from your 3-D printer. http://bit.ly/KcCckH The future is ridiculous.

Good-bye, Adam Yauch. You were the coolest. Sendin’ out love to all corners of the land....

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:36:00 -0400

Good-bye, Adam Yauch. You were the coolest. Sendin’ out love to all corners of the land. http://bit.ly/KvP6qG

NOT OK. Dear World, Some of you are boxers. Some of you are bus...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:28:00 -0400

NOT OK.

Dear World,

Some of you are boxers. Some of you are bus drivers. By all means, spell things wrong.

But if you are in a profession where you earn your living through providing high quality content, then please, for the love of Pete, SPELLCHECK YOUR HEADLINES. Not the paragraphs, not the fine print (I mean, it’s not like I’m expecting you to pay attention to the spellcheck that’s built into all your devices all the time - I’m no monster), just the headlines.

I came across these two examples within 5 minutes of each other, and just had to vent a little to stave off an embolism. I’m not asking you to care about quality. Just don’t shove your disregard for the building-blocks of our shared humanity directly into my face.

Sorry, it’s been a long week.

As a web developer, this is impressive. As a student, this is the most tempting thing I’ve...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:44:00 -0400

As a web developer, this is impressive. As a student, this is the most tempting thing I’ve ever seen. http://essaytyper.com/

Congratulations, public (this means you!) - Harvard just put 12 million things in your domain....

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:34:00 -0400

Congratulations, public (this means you!) - Harvard just put 12 million things in your domain. http://hvrd.me/I9p6TH

Removing the :hover pseudoclass for touch devices = butt

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:12:00 -0400

I just spent way too much time on this. Why on God’s green earth would certain device manufacturers named after certain fruit (I’m looking at you, Kumquat Komputers), retain :hover? YOU CAN’T HOVER ON A TOUCHSCREEN.

Couldn’t get @media queries to work for the life of me. Ended up throwing a notouch class into the body element, then disabling it with some JS called by the ontouchstart event.

*Sigh*

Good call, Simon. Insanely busy? Better start a new subreddit to moderate.

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 21:21:00 -0400

Good call, Simon. Insanely busy? Better start a new subreddit to moderate.

Too early to say if these AR glasses from Google will be awesome, but they still know how to make a...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:46:00 -0400

Too early to say if these AR glasses from Google will be awesome, but they still know how to make a damn fine ad http://bit.ly/HmG3u6

An open source, minimalist camera

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:47:00 -0400

An open source, minimalist camera:

Am I the only one who looks at this and starts hearing Al Green singing in the background?

plugged my computer into my tape recorder. made a mixed tape....

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:18:00 -0500

plugged my computer into my tape recorder. made a mixed tape. gonna lay on the grass with a nice lady tomorrow on the first really spring day.

Here's the Tristen interview, transcribed.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:05:00 -0500

I had to type this out, so I thought you might want to have a look at it.

This interview was conducted March 7^th, 2012, with Tristen Brown, over at Intersteer on Roncy. Here is Tristen’s bio from DevelopmentSeed.org:

Tristen creates intuitive, easy to use, and accessible user interfaces that improve the functionality of our websites, data visualizations, maps, and other online tools. He blends his eye for innovative design with solid experience in web development - particularly in JavaScript and Node.js - allowing him to design interfaces that complement and enhance the usability of our tools.

Prior to joining Development Seed, Tristen designed and built websites for academic and nonprofit institutions. He also led web development projects at some the largest advertising agencies in Toronto, where he pushed for clean, enticing designs - and for open source tools.

Tristen is also a trumpet player who enjoys jazz and composing and performing music. He earned a Bachelor’s of Art degree from the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and later completed a residency at the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab with a focus on software. He hails from Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Simon Borer: So our first question is how long did it take you to get where you are today, but I’m also interested in your career path.

Tristen Brown: So, I come from a background of music, and I decided to go back to school for media, looking at interactive media and how music plays a part with another interest I had, which is computer science, and that led me into this world of open source CMS, working a lot with Drupal, a little bit of Ruby on Rails, a little bit of those frameworks. What interested me in that was this open source community, in that, like if you had a question, somebody was able to answer it really quickly, and you could get a project up and running quite quickly.

So, this is probably back in 2007, I worked as a freelancer, mostly billed as a Drupal developer, building sites for clients, some of which included the University of Toronto, the Jewish Studies program, a few ad agencies, this is 2007-2010, building content management systems. This afforded me a lot of time to work on something that had a lot of trial and error. I learned a lot during that process.

So, after freelance, I started working for a dude in Toronto named James Starr…

SB: How did you get connected with him?

TB: A friend of mine, Dan, who’s a photographer, his brother-in-law works for Doug Agency in Toronto. Dan just passed my name to Ian and basically said, you know, “Are you looking for a front-end developer, anyone to start working on your internet stuff?” And Ian was like, “No, we kind of like contract this stuff out to James, but we should talk.” And, I just started talking to James. The rest of it is history, with him at least. I immediately hit it off with him, worked on some cool projects, mostly ad-related. I did that, for probably two years.

I should say how I got to where I’m working now, which is in D.C. for a start-up. I started following this guy I really admire on Twitter. His name is Young Hahn. He was a designer & developer at Development Seed, and the moment I followed him, I guess he had a look at my portfolio, had a look at some of the work I had done, and seen some of the open-source contributions I had made through theme-ing and working through some of the module projects, and he sent me sort of direct reply and said, “Hey, listen, we’re hiring. You should drop an email to Eric Gundersen, the owner of Development Seed at the time, just sort of say ‘hello’”. And I immediately passed this off as, “Oh, I’m flattered, thanks, you just made my day.” He sent a quick text back and said, “Dude, I’m serious, talk to us.”

At the time, I was working for SapientNitro, which is a big ad agency, and that kind of happened immediately after working with James, and I happened to be in D.C. at the time, so it really worked out that after I got this tweet, I was able to go into the office the next day, kind of secretly going off for another job interview. But had a chance to talk to them, see what they were doing. They were interested in Node.js at the time; I was really interested in that. Their roots are in Drupal, and that’s where my roots come from, that’s really where I know Young’s work. It was this great circle of being a strong component, like, following Development Seed, or being a part of the Drupal community, and then being kind of disenchanted with PHP, getting more into the Javascript element, they were kind of doing the same thing, so it all really worked out well.

So now I’ve been there for a year and half, things have been pretty great.

SB: So if I can just connect the dots really quickly, you contributed to open source, and that’s how you built up a killer portfolio, and then you reached out to people, or people reached out to you through social networking.

TB: Yeah, great example of Twitter really working.

SB: Let’s rewind a bit and you can tell me what made you choose this career. It’s not necessarily a natural leap from the arts to interactive media.

TB: At Development Seed I play a creative role, not only as a front-end developer, I do a lot of the theme-ing, and creative for our client work. So that was a really great fit for me. Before music or even during music I kind of wanted to be a cartoonist or an illustrator, so I’ve definitely been interested in art for a long time. And my entry into building websites was probably, I was probably most skilled at designing interfaces that didn’t really look like the content management system it was while people were kind of like leaning on frameworks and stuff, I was kind of rolling out my own thing and getting pretty far with that.

I guess my interest in getting into all this stuff was, I kind of understood how HTML and CSS worked, and as a tool it was working really well creatively for me, so I was able to concept something in my head, or draw it out and implement that as a tool. And it happened pretty quick and systematically, so it was a natural progression, being able to think about this as something I could do as a career.

SB: What do you like most about it?

TB: I really enjoy the time it affords me to learn more. There’s a lot of time scoped out for research and development. So, we might be doing a new thing, and it really gives us an opportunity to test a new technology or even build up on my programming skills.

It also really tests the limits of doing a creative, and doing one that is really agile, right? But we start with base template, I’m working on something, and it’s going to quickly change, ‘cause there’s larger requirements, and we’ve got to think of the bigger picture, like, months from now, how is this site going to work. And those are great challenges. So I enjoy the constraints that are laid out on design, and having to design around problems, but also upping my programming skills through stuff I’m learning and actually just through process.

SB: I think that might be true of a lot of the creative types that get into what we’re doing. You’ve got a set of constraints and goals, and you’ve got to creatively problem-solve within them. You’ve got to play this song in a particular genre, solo in a particular key, in the context of what other musicians are doing…

TB: Totally, totally and sometimes that’s problem solved creatively, by designing around an issue, or programmatically, you know? And it’s really being able to use both tools, or even another language, you know, maybe another language is going to solve this a lot easier, maybe this needs to be server-side code and not client-side code that’s taking care of this issue.

SB: What’s your least-favourite thing about it?

TB: You know, sometimes it’s difficult to be pretty candid, like, checking in, letting people know what I’m doing. The communication I’ve always found really difficult…

SB: With a client? With a co-worker?

TB: So, client, totally. Even with a team a little bit. While I do understand the virtue of talking to the team, understanding where they’re coming from and what they’re working on, I’m not the greatest communicator in the world, so it’s hard for me to unplug from what I’m doing and stop for a second and understand that this is part of this larger entity, and I need to give everyone the heads up as to what I’m working on. I like to see work to its completeness, and, in an agile setting, you’re exposing everything to everyone.

Is it fair to say that’s the Canadian in me? Working for an American company? If my work’s not that well done, I feel kind of apologetic, or even self-deprecating in a sense. “It’s not there, but it will be, though!”

I’m getting a little bit of a harder shell with that stuff.

SB: What are the things that I can do to have a successful career?

TB: Glean as much as you can from people that you know. So, a few things: we talked about Hacker News, a great place to read really great articles that are targeted towards our trade. And it might be about a different language, but you’re pulling in a lot from another realm that has a lot of application to what you’re doing.

SB: So you’re saying I should still read the Ruby on Rails articles?

TB: I think so, yeah. Definitely filter, but in terms of software architecture, and definitely high level classes, even functions, how those are designed in other languages, and how it translates, man, I found that stuff so valuable.

Boy, the other thing I would say, I feel like this got me to a really good place, career-wise, just understanding the scope of all your friends and co-workers who are working in the same realm, get people knowing about what you’re doing, what you’re qualified with, communication. Just as far as that stuff goes, the simple act of me telling Dan that I was interested in more ad-agency type work got me a great interview with James, I ended up working with him and it lead me to going down to D.C. So that was pretty valuable.

You know, the other thing I would say is contributing. If you’re going to be working in an open-source community, contribute in any way possible. And you might not think that your code chops are there quite yet, but the simple act of contributing to documentation, or even writing documentation, that’ll teach you a lot about the problem. Even if you don’t even know it yet. Writing the documentation for it will really school you.

SB: I’m going to my first #DevTO meet-up later on this month. Do you go to any meet-ups? Do you belong to any professional organizations, anything like that?

TB: I think there’s a new Node.js meet-up that’s happening at some point in Toronto. They had their first one a couple months ago. I’ll definitely go out to the next one. The only other meet-up that I attend as regularly as possible is the OpenStreetMap meet-up, which is kind of monthly thing; you can find it on Meetup.com.

SB: The next question is, “Did you always know that you would be doing what you are doing now,” but I think we kind of covered that when we talked about your career trajectory and how you got where you are. But what sort of expectations did you start out with? Once you started in this field, where did you picture yourself heading?

TB: Yeah, I have no idea really. I think in this world, you wear a lot of hats. At least for me, like, as a developer, a strictly front-end developer, or even as a designer or focusing on UI or even architecture, I’m carrying a hat for all these kinds of roles and positions and that’s kind of interesting, but… I’m not sure how I thought how I would wind up, what I’d be focused on. I knew that the job was a lot like that, and I’m glad that now that I’m working for a company, it’s similar to working as a freelancer, where I had to wear a lot of hats, for the design, for the implementation, for the build. Working with a small team, you’re kind of expected to do a lot of those things.

SB: Do you think somebody that’s just starting out that might try and have a narrow vision of where they’re going, do you think they’re going to limit themselves? Do you think it might be better in this field to cast a wide net?

TB: I don’t know, I think that if your concentration is as, say, an information architect, then I would be an expert at it. I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert at anything that I do. I’d say I’m getting increasingly better at all those things, but, if you’re going to be specialized, you’d better be damn good at it. Most start-ups are going to want you to play multiple roles. I think that’s in some ways specific to a front-end developer, someone who’s designing, that you have to do a lot of different things. If you’re going to be a low-level programmer, I’d say definitely brush up on more than one language. Having a good understanding of how far a particular language is going to get you is good. So I’d say as a low-level programmer, don’t limit yourself to one language, and as a front-end developer, don’t limit yourself to front-end development or architecture. Even an information architect, having a strong understanding of how the language works is extremely important.

SB: Now, I know you haven’t worked for a million start-ups, but, if you were looking at joining up with a start-up, what kind of things would give you confidence in them, and what sort of things might give you pause? ‘Cause it can be a bit of a risky proposition, right?

TB: Oh yeah, for sure. I think it’s a pretty human thing, you just have to believe in what they’re doing, and you see a good role for yourself. If you feel like you’re a good fit in that company, what you’re going to provide is a lot of investment to them, like, you’re going to get a lot in return. I mean I think you definitely need to believe in what they’re working on. And they have to be expected to, even as a start-up, provide a pretty good income. If it’s your own thing, settle on whatever, but if you’re going to be hired on, I would negotiate a pretty good salary.

SB: What has surprised you about the job?

TB: My own progression. I guess in some areas I thought I would be a lot stronger in, like, having a better handle on Node.js and the frameworks that we’re working on. I knew of Development Seed for a number of years and had a good, strong understanding of how they work as a company, so, going back to what I originally said, I guess I thought my development chops would increase, especially with low-level stuff, but you can only concentrate in so many areas. So there’s that.

Another thing that surprised me was the amount of time that’s required.

SB: Let’s talk specifically about when you left school and started working, the difference between what you were expecting once you were done school, and what you found to be true in the working world.

TB: So, between working where I’m at right now, and also as a freelancer, things have changed in that, I guess when you have a job like this, the amount of hours that you commit to it in a day is a lot longer than I thought, I’m definitely working a lot of overtime hours that… it just kind of is what it is, you’re just kind of expected to work long hours. That’s just kind of the reality of it.

It’s an increasingly evolving skillset that’s happening on a regular basis. I guess I was kind of surprised just how quick the development world changes, and how much of it is in your best interest to have a good understanding of, whether you’re implementing or working on these things, having enough time, even over the weekend, to experiment with these technologies is so worth it, because it can change the direction of where you’re going, career-wise.

SB: Because things are constantly evolving on so many fronts, how do you personally decide what to keep up with and what to explore? What directs your learning?

TB: I can really just look at this from a perspective of working at Development Seed, a lot of it is like, not only are we an agile company, but we regularly post internally on a blog, called devlogs, and we talk about any research and development we’re doing, or even problems we’ve encountered on projects. If somebody’s working on something very different, this is a chance for them to share different, better, new technologies. So a lot of my influence as to what’s kind of cool comes from that. Some of the engineers that are working at Development Seed sharing, like, “This is a cool technology, and here’s some comparative ones, this is why I think this is a good fit.”

So a lot of it’s like, I respect this engineer, so I’m gonna definitely follow that stuff, and it’s obviously going to come with some bias.

Hacker News is, again, a really good resource to see where the entire dev community’s headed, what they’re thinking about, where you can better understand the entire ecosystem of all these languages. I think you get a pretty great, broad understanding of what’s at a good place to start working with professionally, versus what’s good as a side project.

SB: What are you excited about right now, what have you started exploring that, maybe, doesn’t necessarily pertain to your job, but is, like, “oh, I better get on this”?

TB: Definitely application architecture, like, learning how to reuse every piece of my code as much as possible, but also, like, at the end of the day, what’s the value of refactoring this code in a way that’s going to take up so much of your time, and really when the value that you’re getting out of it is so small?

SB: Sorry, when you say ‘refactoring’…?

TB: Oh, refactoring just means, like, you have this piece of code, this legacy piece of code, and it might not be as performant as it could be, so refactoring usually just means making this code more performant, or smaller, or simplified. And starting off with really good architecture for your software, for your application structure is really good, ‘cause it prevents situations like that. But even as a larger philosophy, sometimes the simple things work. This is what I’m working on. My client-side javascript is getting… better. And it’s getting to a point where I’m not reliant on libraries if I don’t need them; I’m just using straight javascript. It’s been a good education path to learn how to structure your code, learning from example, like, reading the source code of some of these libraries and how they work.

SB: We’ve covered this in a lot of ways, but let me just ask flat out – what advice would you give someone who is thinking about a career in your field?

TB: Go to some meet-ups in Toronto. Definitely, if you have an interest at all in Ruby, or Django, or even OpenStreetMaps, definitely go to the meet-ups…

SB: Sorry, I don’t know what Django is.

TB: Oh, Django is like a Python framework. I think going to these meet-ups is really great, they taught me a lot. They encouraged me to give my own talks, or kind of figure out “how can I add something to this?” or document, or learn something a little bit more.

Let everybody know that you’re a programmer. Let everybody know. ‘Cause you never know where that might end up. Again, I’ve taken a lot of benefit in that. That’s worked out well for me in the past. So, those two key things.

SB: In terms of workflow, or lifestyle, do you have advice?

TB: You can totally do this job remotely. I mean, you can. It works. As somebody who’s kind of learning the programming, it’s really great to be in an office, talk to the person next to you, and work through a problem that way.

But, yeah, this is such a remote gig. Or can be. You can design your job around working from home, which has its benefits, or not. I, for one, I’d like to be in an office, maybe full-time at some point.

SB: What are some mistakes that a new grad could make?

TB: The job previous to Development Seed was at SapientNitro, and, while I liked it, it was very specific to front-end development, and it was just that. Any of the decisions that were handled creatively were handled by an art director or the creative team, and I had some, but very little input. You don’t need to settle for that. There’s a lot of stuff happening right now. It’s a pretty exciting time to be in the field that we’re in, and you don’t need to settle. You don’t need to be working at one place that might be limiting you. If you’re interested in areas of the same field, you should be working in a place that affords you that opportunity.

SB: Cool. I like our jobs.

TB: Me too.

Part two of the Tristen Brown interview. Here’s the...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:37:00 -0500

Part two of the Tristen Brown interview.

Here’s the download links if you want to listen on the go:

Part one.

Part two.

Tristen Brown (@fallsemo) and I talk about entering the web...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:34:00 -0500

Tristen Brown (@fallsemo) and I talk about entering the web development field, freelancing, open source, Node.js, the OpenStreetMaps Project, and networking.

Just as a note, the interview is split into two parts, the first half being recorded at a somewhat noisy bar. You can download both parts through SoundCloud.

Here’s Tristen’s bio from Development Seed:

twitter.com/fallsemo + github.com/tristen

Tristen creates intuitive, easy to use, and accessible user interfaces that improve the functionality of our websites, data visualizations, maps, and other online tools. He blends his eye for innovative design with solid experience in web development - particularly in JavaScript and Node.js - allowing him to design interfaces that complement and enhance the usability of our tools.

Prior to joining Development Seed, Tristen designed and built websites for academic and nonprofit institutions. He also led web development projects at some the largest advertising agencies in Toronto, where he pushed for clean, enticing designs - and for open source tools.

Tristen is also a trumpet player who enjoys jazz and composing and performing music. He earned a Bachelor’s of Art degree from the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and later completed a residency at the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab with a focus on software. He hails from Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

http://developmentseed.org/team/tristen-brown/

Always nice to have a refresher.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:39:00 -0500

Always nice to have a refresher.

When you wake up too late to make coffee and a presenter...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:23:00 -0500

When you wake up too late to make coffee and a presenter doesn’t know the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation, and some guy standing next to you at the urinal tells you you have a bandaid stuck to your head (well, yes, I had surgery), fuck it, it’s Hella time.

Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:29:00 -0500

Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets:

I love it when people figure out ways to not have to wait for the herd to catch up. Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets is all about making CSS into a real language, not just a set of rules, but what’s really cool about this is their browser compliance hack. As busy as I am with school, I’m finding myself diving into this in the moments of free time I get, just for the joy of it.

Besides being The Song That Changed My Life(tm), it’s...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:27:00 -0500

Besides being The Song That Changed My Life(tm), it’s really fun to play spot-the-punk-icon.

Damn, stellar.js, you sexy.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:20:00 -0500

Damn, stellar.js, you sexy.

This will always be the greatest video of all time.

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:40:00 -0500

This will always be the greatest video of all time.