The Divine Comedy of Asynchronous JavaScript

When I was in college, I took an entire class dedicated to the Divine Comedy. I don’t remember very much about it, other than I had little desire to read it and the professor had a thick Italian accent; both of which resulted in this being all that I remember about the book. That, and it had something to do with Dante traveling through hell, purgatory, and eventually, Heaven. So come with me, as we travel through the hell, purgatory, and Heaven of asynchronous JavaScript.

The new site

The new site is finally done! It’s actually been done for a few months now, but my 11 week old son has sort of thrown a wrench into side projects. If you’re not familiar with Jekyll, it’s a static site generator. Meaning, instead of having a bunch of layouts and config files that run server-side when the user visits your page (which takes time), you compile everything in your dev environment, then ship it to production. So yes, you have a bunch of HTML files, but you only manage a handful of layouts and Jekyll does the job of compiling all those HTML files before you deploy. And all the server has to do, is spit out plain HTML. No server-side processing required. There were a number of reasons I moved from WordPress to Jekyll, namely:

On to Jekyll!

Today I’m switching my site over to Jekyll. I’ve done a couple small Jekyll projects, but never a full blog and portfolio. And it will have updated projects, since this site hasn’t been updated in years. Plus, I’m hoping to incorporate some posts about my house’s remodel to show where my time has gone the last 2 years. Updates to come…

So you’re starting work as a web developer?

When I started one of my jobs, I had to attend an orientation that featured a panel of rising stars at the company who were there to give advice on how to succeed at the company. Every panelist offered “work hard” as their advice to success. If they needed to tell me to work hard to succeed at my new job, they had already failed at their hiring choice. “Work hard” is the upfront advice equivalent to “try harder” after somebody makes an honest mistake.

Removing node_modules in a Jekyll build

My Jekyll build recently slowed down dramatically. Like minutes to build versus a few seconds before. Since Jekyll relies on ruby to watch for changes, then compile all your files into a new _site folder, this made working virtually impossible.

3 Easy Features that Enhance the User Experience

What Is Killing Flat Design?

Let me start by saying, I like the flat design trend. And yes, I do believe that it is a trend. Overall, I really liked iOS7 when it came out; and I still like it. There are some apps that I believe have a worse user experience now, such as calendar and contacts (why does the never-used notes section take up so much space above “send message” and “share contact”), but overall I like the design.