Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.
In my mind, the canvas in JavaScript represented an obscure dungeon that I would never dare to venture in. Many times I attempted but did no more than create a circle [see figure 1] on the page. But lately, I have been in a quest to fight my fears and Canvas was the first to tackle.
Saying you love PHP these days is something most people simply keep to them self. You don't have to go on Google and type "Why php sucks" to figure it out. It's one of those things everyone agreed upon and you will be lucky to ride a full eleven story building in an elevator without hearing someone saying why he hates PHP. Well my experience so far beg to differ. I won't call myself an expert but when I am developing using php, the language is rarely the obstacle. Plus the learning curve is basically a straight line.
A site map is the list of pages accessible on a website. It is mostly made for crawlers to make it easier to find pages on your website. Sitemaps are written in XML and follow a set of standards that can be found here. It is pretty easy to build following these sets of rules. Adding a style to your sitemap can make it legible not just to bots but to your fellow humans.
Hopefully this will be my only post about blogging. The whole point of starting this blog was to improve my writing. Hoping that some strangers will find a place in their heart to tolerate my bad writing and look beyond the obvious mistakes and understand the message I am trying to pass. Not that many strangers for the moment but the few that come along did have an opinion. As hurtful as some can be I have come to build friendships out of others. 180 days went by so fast. I still couldn't pinpoint exactly how much I improved until I went to page one and started reading.
Being your own boss is a little overrated. At least in the sense that you have your own company and get to do whatever you want. If you have a successful business then you know that that's not how it works. You work longer hours, you make tough decisions, (like firing people), you have to deal with customers directly and do many more stressful things. But I am not writing this to tell you how to handle your small business. This is about being your own boss at while being an employee.
I get frustrated when I hear people saying how much SO (StackOverflow) sucks. The SO team works really hard to improve the way people close irrelevant questions, but in the process I can't help but notice how newcomers are treated. If their question is not "perfectly" written it takes only a couple of seconds for it to be closed and sent to oblivion. The other thing is when a beginner asks a question, instead of getting help, he will receive a torrent of ridiculing comments and that will refrain him from ever asking another question. We all had to start somewhere but when you are experienced enough you have to give others the chance to get there too.
Most of the code you will write will look stupid when you comeback some times later to review it. Just like when you write a nice article, you know when you re-read it the next day you will find lots of mistakes. But this shouldn't be a reason not to deploy your code to production.
All the web browsers worth mentioning have depricated the blink tag. On Mozilla docs they say: Blinking text is frowned upon by several accessibility standards and the CSS specification allows browsers to ignore the blink value. Not that I have ever needed to use the blink tag but today I am going to show you how to bring it back to life.
There are different strategies to learn something new. With a book, some people perform best with the step by step pattern going from chapter 1 to 12, others jump straight to the section they need, and some others ditch the book entirely and jump in to the problem only to find that they actually need a book or some way to acquire knowledge. I fit best in the third group. When it comes to learning I am always in a hurry. A few years ago when I was still in school, I was frustrated with the pace at which we were going in class. I did slow down eventually eventually but this had lead me to learn things in a very disorganized way.
