Archive for the ‘Career’ Category

The Everlasting Fight To Expand My Metaphorical Sight (Part 2)

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Well, time certainly flies by quickly. Since the last entry in this little mini-series, I’ve globe-trotted some more (London, New Jersey, New York City, DC, San Francisco, Seattle… San Francisco again…) and released some new projects that’ve been in the pipeline for some time. What’s next?

On Traveling

London was a very, very interesting experience. I had the fun experience of being stuck there well past my intended departure date due to a massive snow storm that shut most of Europe down; London Heathrow, why you refused the help of the Army to clear away snow is simply beyond me. That said, the city of London itself is a nice place, one that I could see myself spending more time in. The surrounding area is equally cool and worth checking out! Yet again this was a country where public transportation is pretty slick. Notice a recurring theme here?

The rest of my travels have been pretty US-centric; nothing noteworthy, sans shooting up to Seattle for a week to visit with my younger brother. Now, enough of all this personal drivel, there’s work to discuss.

ProgProfessor

I think kids should be taught programming at a young age, but with absolutely no initial focus on mathematics. People can fight it all they want, but math doesn’t interest kids, and a direct approach to trying to make it interesting so more come into the subject field won’t work. Programming, if taught with a creative and artistic edge, is well suited to fix this problem.

At least, that’s my theory, and the entire line of reason behind my efforts with ProgProfessor. This’ll be followed up soon with a few other new projects, stay tuned!

FeedBackBar

When I got back into San Francisco, I met up with my good friend Brandon Leonardo. Awhile back he had conceived of this pretty cool idea to distribute a “feedback bar” type widget, where any site could sign up, throw some code on, and get immediate feedback from users. It’s an idea somewhat in the same realm as UserVoice or Get Satisfaction, but much more stripped down and to the point. I thought it was pretty cool, and we managed to hack it out in a night.

FeedBackBar is free and quick to implement. Check it out and let us know what you think!

pyGengo – Pythonic myGengo Translation API Library

The other notable release I’ve thrown out in the past month is pyGengo, a library that wraps the myGengo API. myGengo is a cool service that offers an easy, reliable way to get text translated into other languages by other humans. Machine translation alone can be notoriously incorrect, so having a human back it up is quite the awesome technique to have up your sleeve.

pyGengo is fully documented and has a test suite to boot. Issues can be filed on the Github Issue Tracker, give it a shot and let me know what you think!

So… What’s Next?

I’ve got a few projects coming up that should be pretty significant releases, so at the moment I’m working towards those. You should follow me on Twitter to know when they’re released!

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Posted in Career, Personal, Python, Travel | No Comments »

Moving right along…

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

For those who haven’t heard the news, my last day at Webs.com was this past Thursday (July 29th, 2010). After three and a half years, I figured it was finally time to move on.

It’s interesting to reflect on such a large portion of a lifespan. When I joined Webs (then Freewebs) back in 2007, I was actually homeless, and was working a part time job at a Blockbuster. I had gotten pretty tired of that routine, and started cold-emailing companies. Out of all of them, Freewebs was the one who responded and invited me out to interview with them.

I remember being shocked when, a few weeks later, I received an offer to join up. Y’see, it’s no secret that I’m pretty much self taught through and through when it comes to web design – with no formal training, I was surprised that anyone would consider me for a position in this field. Accepting that offer led me down a long path that’s definitely shaped a lot of who I am today, both professionally and personally.

Prior to joining Webs, I knew HTML and CSS well, but when it came to actual programming I had just dabbled here and there, never gaining a solid understanding of the craft in general. Working at Webs was, in many ways, a great substitution for a college experience. The amount of things I learned is staggering – data analysis, in depth design techniques, and more.

Granted, while all that certainly contributed to my growth, I worked my ass off while I was there; I guess I’m simply stating that the environment is easily one of the best possible places to ever work if you’re a developer. All those startup companies in San Francisco that seem so great to work at? Good luck finding anything similar in the Washington DC/Metro area… short of Webs.com. They’re currently looking for front-end developers, and I can personally guarantee that if you hook up with these guys you’ll be a part of one of the most incredible design and front-end teams in this entire industry.

So what’s next?

I’m tired of Washington DC. It’s a great city with a culture all its own, but I’ve grown up around all of this, and I want to see more of the world in general. The west coast is very appealing to me, so I’m most likely headed out there. As my career situation develops, I’ll update this space accordingly.

Besides all of that, I’ve got my open source work to maintain, as well as some other cool projects in the pipeline. This isn’t the end, but moreso the beginning of an epic awesome adventure.

I’m awesome.

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Posted in Career | 6 Comments »

Interviewing for front-end development

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Interviewing people can be one of the most aggravating things in this industry. Just about everybody who walks through your door could be some run of the mill engineer who’s set in their ways.

Now, I should be fair here – I probably see this more often, due to the position I’m in. As a front-end developer, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve had somebody come in for an interview, expecting their database skills and server-setup capabilities to translate into web skills. It’s maddening, at points, and a real problem in the industry – we’re only now beginning to get out of the era where front-end development is treated as a necessary evil.

Front-end development carries its own unique set of problems. Nobody who’s been doing database optimizations for the past five years is going to be able to hit the ground running on UI work; the playing field for this stuff is constantly changing. To that end, I’ve started trying to come up with different interview questions that can help show how someone attacks the kind of work we routinely face.

Seeing as how I’ve been in Javascript-land for the past four months, the most recent one I came up with is this:

The problem is simple: figure out what arguments need to be passed to “t.b()” for it to display the proper message.

I feel like this is a great problem to have someone solve, as it illustrates a few things right off the bat. Are they scared away by encoded characters? Do they even know how to decode those characters? Can they tell, based off the arguments work being done, what types of objects need to be passed?

It helps to draw a clear line between someone who just manages to get by with Javascript, and someone who can really dive in and tear things apart if need be. The code is just ugly enough to make some people roll their eyes back into their head, but it’s deceivingly simple when you get down to it, and that’s why it succeeds at the job.

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