I went to Agile training last month at Asynchrony. Our department director wanted our team and a few others to go. I agree with almost everything about Agile. It’s easy to, at least for me.
Last week, as I prepped for our team’s next project, I decided that I want to push myself to do as much from my iPad Pro as possible. I have edited many sites from my iPad. But at work, I have been working on a C# website for the last few months. Despite trying, it was much easier to work in an IDE (Visual Studio for Mac Preview) on this site. But our next project is a complete redesign of a marketing site, setting it up on a LAMP box with a PHP-powered CMS.
There is a difference between making quick updates to a site and starting one from scratch. Quick updates typically only require Coda and Web Tools. But starting from scratch sometimes requires more tools. So I started looking at what I needed.
Image Tools is what I came up with. Two new tools coming soon to Web Tools. Easily open an image and use a ruler to measure and a loupe to grab colors.
My typical flow is to jot down a stream of consciousness in iA Writer. Lots of unfiltered thoughts. But this time, I downloaded Trello. I’ve never necessarily hated Trello, but I have a thing about todo list apps. I buy tons of them. Trello just didn’t fit my flow before. But this time it did. I created my Ready, Working On, and Done columns and started adding cards to my Ready column.
Saturday, as I finished my designs, I started working cards through my columns. And crap, I’m starting to like Trello.
Watched “How To Train Your Dragon” with Lottie Saturday night. Sitting at church Sunday morning and she says, “Daddy Daddy, dragons!” while pointing out the window.
Okay, I think, what does she see? I walk over to see what she’s pointing at. Canadian Geese. She’s pointing at a gaggle of Canadian Geese outside.
“No, Sweetie, those are geese. They’re worse than dragons.”
“Baby dragons!” she exclaimed.
“Well, remember, even baby dragons can spit acid and fire.”
Dad’s job is to train her for battle. Even with dragons and geese.
Great article on CSS support, making everything look the same everywhere, and more. This line, though, stood out to me. It’s an argument I frequently find myself in. Everyone knows that I hate Bootstrap. The why is what they don’t often understand. That line sums it up.
All too often I see “JavaScript” developers that cannot write a single line of vanilla JavaScript. Front-end developers that struggle outside of Bootstrap. That don’t know what the browser is capable of without Angular.
Have you outsourced your understanding of the basic languages to a framework?
Written by K. A. Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, the Animorphs books first hit shelves two decades ago. The beloved 1990s series told the story of five human kids — Jake, Cassie, Rachel, Marco, and Tobias — who stumble upon a dying alien prince and are recruited into saving the Earth from the Yeerks, a parasitic alien species taking over peoples’ brains.
These books were a critical part of my childhood. I have every book on my bookshelves at my parent’s home. If you want to know my secret origin as a web developer, it is in these books.
I first encountered the Internet at a friend’s house in the mid-90’s. The first thing I did was search for Animorphs. I remember the crappy website that was so cool. When we eventually got access at our house, I got active in the online community around Animorphs. I drew characters and uploaded them to fan art sites, I even launched my own site for a while. Then, as the series ended in 2001 on a cliffhanger, I started writing my own continuation series.
After Animorphs, having been part of the online community for years, K. A. Applegate launched the short-lived Remnants book series. I built my first fully PHP-driven community with forum, fan art, fan fiction, and more.
It’s hard to believe that it has been twenty years since the first Animorphs book. If you have memories about these books, drop them in the comments below.
There are many dorm room Voltaires, many privileged rebels. But here’s the thing: there are fewer atheists in the ER. Life has a way of humbling you.
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But it is not only suffering that often pries open the human heart. Whatever took place in Zuckerberg’s heart and mind, the gift of children is a little worldview in itself, albeit one that comes to you with tightly-shut little eyes and a feeble cry. Though you may reject this discovery, having a child introduces you to a world beyond yourself. Suddenly, in a vigorous and unopposable coup carried out by a 7-pound baby, you are dethroned. You no longer have control of your life; you don’t get to be served by others; you can’t claim to be the priority of those closest to you.
Mark Zuckerberg, like Steve Jobs, falls into a Myers-Briggs personality type of INTJ. I have read much about these two men because I too fall into that personality type. INTJs are one of the most rational, analytical types. Rational types are often least likely to find religion. INTJs are, I believe, the least likely.
This is why my faith, while radical and odd to many not in my head, is very rational and intellectually-driven.
But Zuckerberg has always been an outspoken atheist. Until Christmas, when he posted that “religion is very important”. Having a child can do that to you.
We’ve been told that we’re just all flesh and blood, atoms colliding in a purposeless dance. But that’s not what you feel—in your bones, in your heart—when you look at your sleeping child. That’s not what you sense when your tiny loved one is hurt or sick. That’s not why you get out of bed in the middle of the night to calm your two-year-old experiencing night terrors. It’s not because of atoms colliding. It’s not because of chance. It’s not because of chaos theory. It’s because of love. It’s because your heart has opened to another.
There is so much immaterial. So much that cannot be understood with science. What's more, science often tries to explain the most radically unscientific concepts with theories that are just cold and illogical.
Seeing my daughter’s face for the first time over two years ago stopped time. I only know two women that have caused time to cease. When I hear beneath the sound of our television our daughter cry out “Daddy, help!” from her bedroom upstairs, I’m often on my feet before I can think.
I just resisted posting something to Facebook. And then almost tweeted about resisting posting it to Facebook. It was after the third or fourth sentence, after the second rewrite, that I realized that it was better for my blog than Facebook.
Impulse drives us to post the moment something comes to our mind. Take the extra time to sit on something. The world doesn’t need your commentary immediately. Your snark and sarcasm can wait, even if you don’t catch the trending #hashtag. Be more thoughtful. Slow to speak, slow to anger.
A jury has sentenced to death the man who murdered nine people in a Charleston church basement in 2015.
The twelve jurors deliberated for about three hours before sentencing Dylann Roof, 22, to die. To impose the death penalty, they had to reach a unanimous decision.
It is fundamentally understood among Man that those that shed the blood of men deserve death themselves. No matter liberal, progressive, or conservative, we all recognize that Dylann Roof deserves death for his murderous rampage. It will not bring the men and women that he killed back, but it will bring justice for the families left behind.
While Brooks and others are arguing that iPad will eventually replace the Mac, Gruber is arguing there will always be a need for macOS—specifically a desktop operating system. Despite what my aforementioned dalliance with iPad might suggest, I’m firmly in Gruber’s camp.
Here’s the thought experiment, which I used to inform my opinion: If you could take only one device with you, which one would you take? Ben Brooks or Federico Viticci would almost certainly choose an iPad.
However, I’d take a Mac. Exactly the 11” MacBook Air, which I’m using to write this article.
The other day, we were going to meet up with my extended family for dinner. My wife told me that I needed to bring my laptop, as my aunt wanted to talk about some logo design stuff. I was tired after a day of work and mindlessly grabbed my laptop. I regretted it as soon as we started to talk. Why? Because I couldn’t grab my Pencil and mindlessly sketch out some logos and notes.
Most of my design process is now done on my 12" iPad Pro. Between Adobe Draw, Graphic, and Bez I do a lot of design work on my iPad.
Christmas was on a Sunday. One Thursday, the 22nd, we drove up to Chicago to stay with my in-laws for the weekend. Going iPad-only, I did some doodling, some writing, and some reading. But I wanted to work on an iOS app side project.
Part of my developer life is web development. Something I have done for most of my life. I can do much of this from my iPad. But over the last five years, I’ve delved into iOS development. That “Brooks” that Rob Rhyne mentions above? He, Ben Brooks, linked my professional development app Web Tools right before the New Years, saying, “I wouldn’t be able to troubleshoot website errors without this.” But the sad thing is, I cannot do iOS development on an iPad. Xcode isn’t there yet. So I need my MacBook Air.
So which one would I take? Depends. I have set up a Digital Ocean server, installed Ghost, and built a theme all from my iPad. I have designed entire websites on it too. And designed logos, posters, flyers, and more. But if I need to work on an app, I gotta have my MacBook.
So, it’s like Ben Brooks has said, “I couldn’t use my Mac as my only machine in 2004, but in 2005 I could.” If it were about preference, I’d be on my iPad 100% of the time.