Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
If there is one thing I learned from obsessing over Stack Overflow, it's how to find solutions. Soon I will have answered over 900 questions and this number will keep going up. This is not to say it is a lot, many users have much more quality answers. But If you have done anything over a 1000 times then you had the chance to screw up a lot. Screwing up is synonym to getting experience here.
When I started working as a web developer, there was no longer a need to use the hacks from the 90s to make your website work. The marquee and blink tags where already dead. I could still see some old blogs referencing document.layers but they were on their way out. But still when I started, I had to worry very much about writing cross browser code.
It is a common practice for developers to silence errors when developing with PHP. Many times the @ operator is used to simply ignore errors and continue to work in case of failure.
I had a hard time following the school program. Sitting down, watching a teacher with no confidence talk about things that are supposed to be exciting was not my idea of learning a new skill. I once read somewhere that in the United States education system, the motto is No child left behind. Here I was sitting down in class feeling left behind. I came to school to learn the minimum to be propelled into a career where I will be able to grow and never have to worry about bills, grocery price, or rent. But the professor was talking about "Java or JavaScript", then gave us code to copy and paste into a dot HTML file. None of this made sense to me.
Starting a small business is hard. Just ask a small business owner, they will tell you how the economy is not in their favor or that it is hard to find good loyal employees. The cost of business is becoming ever more expensive. The owner of a small business is likely to have saved up some money for years, quit his job, then started a restaurant, hardware store, auto repair shop, grocery store, etc. Startups however are the hip new thing young people do. The stories from "founders" start with sleeping in a van for 3 months. Then against all odds, they make a big demo with scraped resources. Finally the jackpot when the round of funding arrives.
Every so often I get an email from a CEO, CTO, or someone running the show in a company. They see my blog, go through my stackoverflow, check some of my projects and they feel it is only natural to contact me. I am currently employed, but I am always open for the right offer.
If there is one thing a web server does everyday it iss connecting to the database. I have been using PHP for many years now, but if you ask me to write a script to fetch data from the database I couldn't do it without going back to the Ultimate PHP manual to find a few examples first.
Most if not all IDEs come with syntax highlighting. It makes it easier to read your code and gives you less headache when debugging. Sometimes I share code snippets right here on my blog and until recently I wasn't really paying attention on how it looks. Since most of the time it is my code, I have no trouble understand it it, even though it looks like a screen shot from Notepad.
Everybody wants to be a good listener. Actually, I think deep down everyone thinks they are great listeners. It is easy to pass as one, at least in theory. All you have to do is keep quiet when the other person is talking. But then they say something that you can relate to, like how they went skiing over the weekend. Now you want to tell them how you went too a couple weeks ago and that it was the biggest snow storm of the year. But you can't say it because they are still talking. You don't want to be a bad listener now do you? So you start thinking, "uhuhing", and waiting for them to finish talking so you can tell your story too. You are no longer paying attention. Just waiting for a long enough pause so you can take over the conversation.
A new idea pops in mind, we open the IDE, start coding and a couple of hours later Boom! It is done. It works. Now everything you do today requires a website to market it. So you throw in a little UI with bootstrap and poor wording and your work is published.
