• On Life and Love

    Long-awaited Granny Squares Design Going Live

    Years, folks. Years. That weird fabric texture background is finally going away. Ever since I’ve thrown myself full-tilt at Future Proof Games, I’ve let my older side projects run as they are with no updates from me unless something was catastrophically wrong. A lot has changed on the web since Granny Square Colors got a major update from me, though: tablets and smartphones are even more popular among the GSC user base, Internet Explorer isn’t the worst thing to develop for anymore, and I’m a way better architect and coder than I was a handful of years ago.

  • On Life and Love

    Links On Uncomfortable Realities

    A short one this week as I’m struggling to catch up on/skim 1400+ unread items in Feedly. “She Must Have Deserved It”: An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse, And Reporting It | Ferrett Steinmetz – "And the good news that emerges from this particular bad response is that most people would never hit their partner. When told, “He hit her,” most people run this information through a I-am-the-world filter…" and "[If] you’re a victim of abuse, you need to be very careful as to who you date. Children of abusing parents are fifteen times – fifteen times! – as likely to wind up married to an abuser as so-called “normal” people,…

  • On Life and Love

    Beginner Developer: Where to Start?

    I have a friend who’s looking to become a marketable developer fairly quickly, but is essentially trying to go from zero to hero. Despite starting a project in Python to randomize wedding slideshows, he’s never really done development, nor does he understand its core concepts (classes vs. objects, for instance). He kinda just needs a job, plus the ability to make useful tools for himself. Folks are telling him Java and *.NET, and I (mostly) agree for the simple purposes of 1) easy desktop or web development, and 2) using keyword-heavy languages to reinforce programming concepts. Not strong reasons, no. If he just wanted a job, I’d recommend UI development.…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work

    This week’s internet cruising: Questionable Content – Tool reference! What does English sound like to foreign ears? – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks – An absolutely amazing song and video by an Italian comedian faking English, plus some adorable animal sounds. Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Reading this sent me back to an old client’s site (from almost two years ago), remembering the CRUD-based admin console I developed that was such an incorrect way to go about giving them the functionality they needed. Oy. Renaming Many Files At Once with Pattern Matching in Bash | Andy Regan – This proved very…