Musings

I first created my blog in 2014. For the next ~10 years, it stayed the same, only adding new posts through 2017 when I lost the ability to easily make new posts (note: always save source files to the cloud). Its design held up surprisingly well!

In the last ~1.5 years CSS-Tricks has basically died and Twitter has similarly taken a blow thanks to Elon. As a result, I have tech stuff that I want to explore and post about but not a great place to post it.

Additionally, in the last ~6 months I’ve been using Svelte a lot more and I figured now’s a good time as any to rebuild my blog. I should probably redo my personal site sometime…

In this post I’ll cover some of the key changes and cool new tech that I got to use in building this blog!

Design aspects

I’ve been wanting to redesign my personal website/portfolio for the past couple of years. I had the previous version since 2014 (if not before), and only made minor updates to it. It did the job, but wasn’t really impressive like I wanted it to be in order to apply to the companies I want to work at. But I spent all my extra time working on other projects and didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to do with it until recently.

One day in class in my final semester at UGA I got a bit of inspiration to use parallelograms as a slider to show projects, so I made a quick sketch and figured I had enough skill to develop it pretty well. I made use of CSS clip-paths and got a working version of the design in code. However, the result wasn’t as impressive as I was imagining (though I still think it’s cool and could be a valid slider in the future for a different site) and it wasn’t the most usable thing I’ve made.

I’ve been part of some web developer chatrooms for ~4 years now. In order to help newcomers quickly get used to them, here are some etiquette tips:

• Keep the number of messages you post to a minimum. No one wants to read 10 separate messages that should have been one message. It fills up the chatroom and makes less content in total visible.
• If you’re requesting help, be very concise and clear, generally keeping the question of your scope very limited. This is true in all mediums, but especially true for chat. It is better for everyone, including yourself, to do so.
• Don’t update people every time you’re leaving or apologize for not responding immediately. There are exceptions, but in general people don’t expect immediate replies all of the time. Be patient when expecting others to answer and don’t flood the chat with, “be back in 2 minutes” type of comments.
• Chatrooms operate in UGT (Universal Greeting Time). Or better yet, no time at all. Don’t create a bunch of noise about the time of day when someone includes it in a message of theirs.
• Use chatroom features appropriately when they are available. If your chatroom platform supports threading, use it. If it supports editing old messages, use that for corrections and simple additions instead of creating new messages. If it has a bot, don’t abuse it by using it too much or posting content irrelevant to the chat. If it supports “pinging” people, don’t do it unless you really need to.

About business

• Efficiency > exact precision for most things
• Good interaction between co-workers is one of the most important things for employee retainment and satisfaction
• Good interaction with clients is what is memorable to clients and makes employees stand out
• Good product is necessary for client retention
• Options (including availability) gets a bigger client base
• There’s always a place for a good employee
• It’s better to have (reasonably) too much than not enough
• People get way more upset about unexpected loss than expected loss
• Special events bring in some traffic but don’t affect long term growth very much
• Focus on what your company is good at, including specific products
• Clients hate things they see as necessary being taken away but will get over it if the product is still good
• Making things look pretty is not of much concern, though it does play a factor
• Group buy in helps immensely

About life

• Meet people where they’re at
• People love and bond over food
• Be open minded at all times
• People can be alone while being surrounded by people
• It’s good, fun, and profitable to meet random people at times
• Everyone has their own story and is awesome in some ways
• Most everyone likes to have a good conversation
• Diversity in choices is necessary to prevent burnout
• There are times for big groups and times for small ones
• Nothing beats a good home cooked meal

Most any time we go to a new place, we are looking to find activities to do. It could be anything from hiking to finding a trendy coffee shop. When I first came to study at the University of Georgia, I found myself in this situation, particularly in respect to finding activities for groups of people to do and activities to do on dates. Over time I came to know a lot of local places and activities, but it took a lot of talking to people and didn’t always come when I wanted it to. It would have been great to have a way to find out about all of those activities quicker and more easily.

My sophomore year, I created a quick little prototype of an app to do just this. I called it Palm Date. It started as a project just so I could practice UI animations but turned into something I could actually use on dates to help us choose activities to do. A gif of how it worked is below.