Behind The Scenes

When somebody I know visits Slick Text for the first time, they're inevitably impressed. In my completely biased opinion, Slick Text is a great product, and there is good reason that these people offer compliments. Similarly, our customers are often very pleased with our company and our product.

Being Programmers

I wrote a guest post over on Recoding: Being Programmers

It's about frustration, learning, teaching, and being good at what we do. Check it out.

Solved Problems

Recently, I read an interview with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., the company that puts out the ubiquitous tech books with the animals on the front (and, oddly enough, a great cookbook). O'Reilly facilitated the open-source movement, as well as the "maker" movement, through publishing technical manuals, and through hosting conferences and summits. In short, he gave us a way to talk about community engineering, programming, and creating in general. A banner under which "makers" can unite.

I consider myself a maker. I enjoy problem solving, especially in concrete ways. When I come up with a website, a service, or even just some snippet of code that people can use (even if they don't), it's a rush. I've written about this "superhero" feeling before.

Not How, But What

A happy developer is a productive developer. That fact should be obvious to everybody who interacts with a developer of any sort.

Developer happiness is affected by a lot of things. The work environment, the projects they are given, their managers, the flexibility of their schedules, and the quality of their tools. This last one is very important. If a developer doesn't like the tools they are using, it's a safe bet they won't be happy, and thus won't be as productive as they could be.

Styling By IDs: Case In Point

There has been some argument in the web development community about styling HTML by IDs. Arguments against styling by ID include specificity (IDs are hard to override), and, more importantly, code reuse.

I Was Wrong

I mean, I was right… the first time.

When I first started working on SlickText, I converted the code that the CEO/Designer had written such that it would use Smarty templates. It was the right way to do things. However, he pushed back, saying it was “too complex”, and I caved and reverted back to the PHP/HTML files and output buffering that he was using previously.

The Dangers of CSS Resets

For a while now, people have been using CSS reset files to, well, "reset" their pages to a default, unstyled state. Until recently, I had never used one, and my current use of one is not by choice, but because it was already in place when I started my new job.