Archived entries for General

  • April 20, 2010
  • In General
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Things That Are New

It’s been a wonderful and crazy several weeks around here. I have a couple of new things in the works and one awesome one that was recently delivered.

Starting with the personal portion, my wife and I had our second child on March 17th (a St.Patrick’s Day baby, so I already fear what she’ll be doing for her birthdays years down the road). Her name is Penelope and she’s just awesome. Overall, we’re doing great and are more rested than we thought we’d be at this point. Though I hope I didn’t just jinx us. Here she is laying with her big sister, Ellie (Penelope’s on the left).

Ellie and Penelope

On the web front, I’m working on a couple of neat things. The first is a simple web app that should be fairly useful to parents of toddlers (I’ve already used a very early version and it’s helped me tremendously). I’m also using this project as a way to experiment with HTML5 local storage, so this will be a one-pager with no login. Look for an update on this in about a week. In the meantime, here are some of the hand-drawn icons for the app.

Grocery Icons

I’ve also started working on the rework of this site. The current blog setup was just a quick addition and I didn’t want it to stay up too long. I’m using the rework as my excuse to finally learn Expression Engine, so I’ve been diving into EE2 and really liking it so far. I’ll post some more on that once I have it in a state I’m starting to be happy with or when I can score a Dribbble invite, whichever happens first.

  • February 5, 2010
  • In General
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Starting Point

Rewind four years. I was a biology instructor, secure in my knowledge and the information that I was teaching. Why wouldn’t I be? I studied biology in undergrad and grad school and was a Teaching Assistant for three years during grad school. All this training led me down the path to the classroom and gave me the confidence I needed to succeed.

Four years into it I made a huge leap and moved into front-end development (that’s a longer post for another day). With the switch also came a change in my status from teacher back to being a student. As a student, I’ve learned from blogs, books, friends, people I’ve worked with and my own experiments and personal projects. What I haven’t done is engage with the larger web community. The drop in status back to student brought with it the insecurities of thinking everyone knows more than you, even after years of working and studying. And that change was much harder on me than I thought it would be. I was scared to put myself out there and try to add to the discussion.

During a conversation last week, I realized that it’s time for me to get past that feeling of just being a student and push my role forward again. I’m good at what I do and have ideas and thoughts I’d like to share and discuss. To do that, I need to start engaging with others in our field, experimenting more and sharing the results of those experiments.

So this is the starting point. A while back, I toyed with the idea of starting the blog (mainly because I felt like I had too). I worked on some designs but nothing was quite right. I didn’t want to put it up until I had a design I thought was perfect, so I punted. I’d just sit on it for a while and do it later. And I was happy to, because, as I’ve explained, I was a little scared to put myself out there and didn’t really want to do it anyway. Since I’ve finally made the decision to just let go, I decided to make a few quick modifications to a theme so it fits with my current site and start writing. I’ll be tweaking and modifying this design as I go, because it’s not perfect and there are a lot of things I’d like to change. If you see things that are a little out of whack (and there are bound to be some), let me know. I’m glad to finally be joining in and hope I can add a few interesting bits to the interwebs.

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