There's a sublime sort of joy in making your New Year's Resolutions public and then nose-diving on addressing the most public of them (i.e. posting regularly on the blog). Well, joy or embarrassment, though I'd prefer to think I could more readily distinguish the two and yet here we are.
Journeyman Developer
Part of the problem I'm running into is that my initial notion of posting summaries of the areas I'm studying feel like I'd be retreading the material posted by other websites. Last week, for example, I spent a fair amount of time reading about (yes, and practicing) the use of positioning in HTML/CSS layouts. As I started writing my summary post, I realized I was doing a poor retread of the articles from A List Apart and CSS-Tricks. Here at Nonsenseless, we pride ourselves on doing only the highest quality retreads and possibly even adding some hint of originality to the subject matter like a chef adding a dab of oregano or a few spoonfuls of acid. I think a better way to go may be to shift the focus to:
- Code Reviews
- Perforce semi-original, reviewing my own code is a mandatory part of improving as a developer and forcing the process into a coherent post should force me into thinking the process through as logically as possible. If I can't describe the refactoring logically, I'm probably not being logical.
- Experimentation
- While a simple retread of the material seems uncouth and unhelpful, I've noticed that there's usually room for clarification in the fine detail of an article. In A List Apart's positioning articles, for example, it wouldn't hurt to play around with nesting positioning schemes to see the effect. My experience so far is that individual HTML and CSS elements and concepts are darn simple, and it's only when you start combining them that the complexity creeps up.
Down the road, I'd absolutely love to post original developer-oriented content that becomes the reference for solving a problem, but there's no sense getting ahead of ourselves.
Writing
While I'm happy to report solid progress on maintaining a regular writing schedule, the other problem I'm running into is a bottleneck between doing the initial writeup and then transcribing my chicken scratch into text files. I may have to bite the bullet and start doing my writing on the computer to begin with if I want to have any chance of meeting this set of goals.
On the other hand, if I pull it off and get the stories written and posts made, maybe I can bribe myself with a LiveScribe for Christmas >.>
General Life Updates
January continues its reign one of my favorite months. The weather is chilly to cold--no laughing now, Northerners, unless you suddenly feel prepared to take on 106 degrees of summer revved up to 100% humidity--and there are enough dreary, rainy days to foster quiet afternoons tea-sipping and navel-gazing--the two highest ends of human civilization. The hectic pace of Feasting and Good Cheer from the holidays has died down to a low-level feeling of good will, readiness to tackle Life, and, for New Orleanians apparently, a constant stream of parades and king cake.
We've been here a little over five months now, and it's still refreshing to encounter all these events that the city buys into in a big way. And being able to get to them easily. I really can't stress this enough, but we went to the David Bowie memorial the other week and it was incredibly easy to get to a trolley, hop downtown, and walk to the event.
Well, I say it was easy. The memorial itself was a magnificent trainwreck of pedestrians. For blocks in every direction, the streets were packed wall-to-wall with partiers spider monkeys mourners and it took an hour of aggressive walking to cross a couple of blocks, BUT that shouldn't detract from the general ease of getting to the trainwreck nor the spirit of the people crammed together in those streets.
As we slowly glammed our way through the crowd, one fellow yelled, "If anybody knew what the hell was going on, it wouldn't be New Orleans"; another jovial bearded fellow said, "The great thing about New Orleans is that its full of weird people. Weird people are the best people". Several people stopped to tell me my outfit was fabulous. It was a trainwreck, but damn if it wasn't a lively, friendly trainwreck. I felt more at home then than I have since moving here.
I would also like to take a final moment to mourn, not for David Bowie whose departure from this world was so beautifully orchestrated that I can only tip my hat in awe, but for the poor fools that tried to drive down St. Peter and Royal during the parade. At one point, we encountered two SUVs and an Uber driver parked in the middle of the crowd like beached whales.