Category: Software

I’ve pretty much completed a first pass at making all the pages on my web site mobile-first responsive. Along the way I made a hit-list of items that were too much trouble for the first pass, so now I’m circling back to them. They mostly fall into one of a few categories. First is tweaking the existing styles and fleshing out new ones so the page layouts look good under all resizing and formats. Things like font size, padding and spacing. There’s also a few pages with unusual formats that still have to get converted. Some of this gets pretty subtle and I didn’t want to let it slow me down, but it’ll be worth it. Second is adding new content to the existing sections, and I’ve been doing this on an ongoing basis. It’s getting easier now, as the templates are all largely complete. You’ll notice an expanded roster in the music section, for example. Third will be some all-new presentation formats for the audio and visual elements of the site, but that’s still a little ways off. So for now, go click around and see what you can see.

Not too long ago I took a job with an ad agency as a consulting software developer. This was not the first time I worked in advertising. Many years ago, I co-founded Radical Media’s interactive division back in the 1990’s. (Technically they were a media production company, but alot of their clients were ad agencies, including the one I took a job with, and there’s alot of overlap) and I did all sorts of fun and exciting and groundbreaking stuff there. Since then I’ve done freelance ad jobs here and there. It’s actually surprising how little the ad business has changed in twenty years, the corporate culture and all. Stuff that was innovative back then is just business as usual now.

Being a temp position, so there’s no telling how long it’d last. In orientation they gave us alot of feel-good propaganda about how great advertising is, a lovely coffee table book and all, and really who would expect anything less. Good that they really cares about visual design, and to be able to use my design skills, and nice that they’re small enough so you can talk to people on your own floor if there’s some kind of tech problem. The place was totally chaotic however, in a sort of sleepy, hurry-up-and-wait kinda way. I spent three days waiting around for a computer, using various loaners. The computer they finally gave me was messed up, so I spent two more days trying to get it working before giving up and getting another one.

When I got on a project, they threw two other new hires onto the same piece of work. It was not deep but it was wide, and they really wanted to get it done fast as possible. Must’ve been money at stake with the client, so from their perspective this was a sensible way to do it.

The entirety of the work was tweaking CSS to make the site match the comps. Problem was the CSS, which was supposed to be hierarchical in an OO sense, was really a tangled mess. On top of that, there were hundreds and hundreds of auto-generated files that were not under .gitignore, so every time you checked in code there was a shitstorm of conflicts to wade thru. So with six people working in parallel, we all kept overwriting each other’s changes. I never lost any of my work, but most of the others weren’t as careful. Fixing any of this was out of the question cuz it would’ve blown the deadline.

On the third day our git repo exploded and work ground to a halt. The devops guys restored by the next morning. Fun fun fun.

So we worked thru the weekend. By this time we were completely off the script, so I literally spent a whole day with creative director, with him going “move that 10 pixels down” and me making the change in the code, and then him going “hmm, no, move it 5 pixels up.” He seemed a little put off by me questioning why their process wasn’t better. Like I said, the industry hasn’t learned anything in twenty years.

Then Monday the deadline came. I spent another day doing some minor fixes, and that was that. We spent a couple days chilling waiting on a new project. I spent my time reading up on git to see if I could avoid another gitpocolypse in the future, and on responsive frameworks for CSS.

Then we got a new project, a web site for some investment bank portfolio services. Again very CSS-heavy, with some animated charts’n’graphs and things. They gave us access to the git repo, but told us not to start work just yet, as the account people were still working things out with the client. A couple days after that they the deal fell thru and at was that. Of course they thanked us profusely and sincerely hope they can work with us again. And so it goes.

It’s all the rage these days in web development to make your web site responsive and mobile-first. What that means is that it will look good on your phone or tablet, and you don’t have to rewrite the entire web site to do that. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for my site for a long time.

I recently took a consulting gig where making everything responsive, mobile-first is the main focus. There’s a ton of frameworks out there to help you do this, so I spent some time surveying a few of the more popular ones. It turns out the alot of these frameworks are pretty heavy, and pack in alot of design assumptions that might or might not fit with your vision.

For my own web site it’s total overkill, so I decided to roll my own responsive grid work. So far it’s pretty basic, but I can add on to it as needed. The basic definitions can be found at: zingman.com/css/zmpGrid.css. So far I’ve implemented it on two pages: the main home page at zingman.com and the music landing page at zingman.com/music. Go ahead, resize the window, then go look at it on your small, wireless device! It may take a while to update the entire site, but everything is all tempalated out already, so look for more responsive, mobile-first pages coming soon!

As some of you gentle readers may know, I’ve been a-lookin’ for a new job over the summer and into the fall. A mainstay of the industry now is the dreaded tech interview, which wasn’t really a thing last time a went a-huntin’ close to ten years ago. But now they’re all the rage.

In a way it makes sense, cuz whoever is interviewing you needs some way to evaluate your skills and all that. There’s no way they can judge if you can write advanced, subtle and poetic code, so they settle for a much lower level test: can you regurgitate some basic stuff? Still, it’s not always easy to think on your feet and come up with a good answer on the spot. I haven’t used alot of this stuff in my day-to-day in years. Doing a tech interview is a skill in its own right, a kind of performance like jazz improvisation, and it took me a few times to get good at it.

Along the way I compiled a handy quick reference guide. Basically every time an interviewer asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer, or more commonly just wasn’t able to express it in a clear, structured and smooth manner, I wrote down the question, went home and looked it up, and added to my guide. Then I circled back and studied up for the next interview. Before too long I started getting a fair number of repeat questions, and was able to nail more and more of them.

This is not meant to be any kind of comprehensive tutorial, just enough to remind me to spew forth some talking points. As you can see by the topics covered, I cast a fairly wide net with my skillset in the kind of position I’m going for. Really this is a symptom of the state of the industry these days, the way jobs are balkanized by programming language, more than my own itinerant tendencies. “Are you a java guy or a javascript guy?” Oh please. I know like twenty programming languages. And if I don’t know any particular thing I know how to look it up. It’s also a fairly interesting snapshot of what languages and frameworks an in vogue these days, totally different than 2007.

So here you go.

Like the legendary cobbler with worn out shoes, it seems like I’m never able to find the time to work on my own web site. Indeed zingman.com is now twenty years old, and some pages go back to the beginning. Over time I’ve added various bits of php, css, sql, javascript, and wordpress, but I’ve resisted doing a full-on rebuild in an all-new framework and technology stack for several reasons, including that it’s a large time investment, the technologies keep changing, and it’s not really necessary anyway, at least right now. I am thinking of making everything responsive for mobile devices, but there’s alot of pages in there. So I upgrade things on an as-needed basis, always making things more automated, and growing closer to the vision step-by-step. Meanwhile everything runs extremely light and fast.

Over the spring I managed to complete a fairly major upgrade cycle for styles and page layouts, with everything finally in a stack of hand-built php templates and modules. In the last couple weeks I’ve started another round of work. This one is to put all the image links into popups. Better user experience, less clicking back’n’forth. I used lightbox for this; it’s one of the simplest javascript plugins out there for this purpose, and so far seems to work just fine. Have to do a little tweaking of the styles, but that’s about it. So feel free to click around to different pages and check it out.

Next step is go thru the origami pages and add support for multiple images for each module. This will involve refactoring some of my templates to handle photosets of different lengths, so I want to give it a bit of thought before I plow on ahead. Check back here in a week or so.