Girl, Unedited

Girl, why do you do this to me?

Don’t I love you? Don’t I respect you? Don’t I treat you better than any other man ever has? Why do you have to treat me this way?

Embracing The Demons

You can’t focus. You troll around Hacker News and all of the articles are about people younger than you doing cooler things, faster, and making millions doing it. You’re frustrated, depressed and unmotivated.

You’ve got the demons.

Unconventional Skills and Tactics

Web Development isn’t just data types and syntax – it’s really about problem solving. Sometimes the problems that need solving aren’t less about computers and more about people, and that can work to your advantage.

So You Want To Be A Developer

In this post, I discuss the first steps I took to stop being a salesman and start being a web developer. It wasn’t exactly a promising start…

A New Design for a New Year!

Starting the year off right with a refresh of my andrewheins.ca. The old design wasn’t properly implemented, and I wanted to test a few more modern practices with this site.

Dealing with Conflicts in Git

Something that I didn’t find immediately obvious was how to deal with conflicts in Git, so here’s a quick tutorial. Conflicts arise when two different branches are working on the same file and then try to commit changes. Conflicts don’t have to be catastrophic, it simply depends on what’s happend with the file.

The Mad Science of Web Design

Back in high school, you probably learned the Scientific Method. It probably looked something like this:     (quoted from sciencebuddies.com) When I first got started with web design, I thought it was an art. That was bad news at the time because if you’ve ever met me, you’ll know I’m not the most artistic [...]

Mocking a Responsive Design

Responsive Design, or the idea that a website should respond to the size and orientation of the device on which it’s being viewed, is a tough concept for some designers and developers to wrap their heads around. The best advice I can give someone who is just getting started in responsive design is to starting [...]

Stop Screwing with the Scrollbar!

A new trend that I’ve seen in UI design lately is to try to redesign the scrollbar. While I understand the good intentions, we’ve seen some particularly horrible examples of UX from these attempts. A Horrible Idea Reinventing or reskinning the scroll bar isn’t exactly a new phenonmenon. Ever since Flash became a popular medium, [...]

Reddit-Style Comments for Hacker News

Ever wish you could collapse the comments on Hacker News like you can on Reddit? I sure did. So much so that I wrote a little script to add that functionality. Not a complicated little project, but certainly satisfying. Download the Chrome Extension Download the GreaseMonkey Script View the Source on GitHub

Code Snippet of the Day: appendToFileName

I find myself having to append file names often in JavaScript.  var appendToFileName = function(filename, toAppend) { var x = filename.lastIndexOf(‘.’), before, after, newFileName; before = filename.substring(0, x); after = filename.substring(x, filename.length); newFileName = before + toAppend + after; return newFileName; }; Anyone know why substring in JavaScript isn’t subString? That gets me every single [...]

Jumping Through the Hoops

Applies to Learning, Coding, Writing, Sports and just about anything else worth doing… I’ve spent the past week learning about Unit Tests and TDD. It’s a frustrating process that shows a lot of holes in your code and your development methodolgy, but from what I’ve seen so far, I get better code from it. I’ve [...]

Security: GitHub and You

I love GitHub, but just realized a potential mistake that put me into a panic until I’d verified that I hadn’t fallen pray to it yet. Does your source code include passwords, keys, or other information in plain-text that you wouldn’t like anyone to see? Does your application include a web.config type file containing such [...]

Loading Dependencies Reliably in Javascript

I’ve been playing with Canvas recently and got to try out the excanvas library in order to extend 2d canvas functionality to IE. I can’t speak highly enough about excanvas by the way, try it out if you get the opportunity. Anyway, I found myself in a situation where I was loading excanvas in the [...]

The “Process”

While I’ve been working on the web for a long while now, my personal projects have really stepped to the forefront over the past couple of years. My “process” for getting work done has evolved over that time, but not exactly in the way I expected. “Process” If you’ve ever read someone like Rands, you’ll [...]

Intro to Mixins (in Javascript)

based off microevent.js by jeromeetienne https://github.com/jeromeetienne/microevent.js/blob/master/microevent.js I was just reading through microevent.js by jeromeetienne and stumbled across the awesomeness that are Javascript mixins! I’ve use his code as a template to show how mixins work in Javascript.   Hey! Just let me see the darn demo!   And to those of you who stuck with [...]

The Frustrated Generalist

Nathan Ford recently wrote a blog called Be Mega, focusing on being a generalist. As a frustrated generalist, I found this article triggered some of my reservations with having never specialized. Like I said, I’m a generalist. I’ve held a number of positions within the jobs and projects I’ve had (front-end developer, back-end developer, information architect, [...]

IE, DOCTYPE and Document Modes

Just in time for the release of IE9 (which, as an XP user, I can’t use), let’s talk about IE8!  Do you ever find your pages rendering funny in Internet Explorer 8 (or later) on other people’s machines that seem to look fine on yours? One reason why this can happen is due to the [...]

Event Binding in Javascript

If you’ve recently picked up Javascript, you may have been quickly introduced to jQuery, mooTools or some other javascript framework that hides away many of the more rudamentary javascript functions that take place in a standard web application. While that’s convenient on the surface, it’s important to know how to do the same tasks without [...]

Changing Gears

Over the past three and a half years at The Printing House, I’ve learned an incredible amount. I came in as a green pup with a few HTML chops and no real work experience, and have emerged a Web Project Manager leading an amazing team of developers and designers on some amazing projects, with a few [...]

Code Fearlessly

I read an article a while back entitled Code Fearlessly. It talks about Git and how, as a result of good version control and software development practices, no developer should be afraid of “ruining” good code in search of a solution to a larger problem. I took a slightly modified lesson from that article, one that’s [...]

A Few Fundamental Truths About JavaScript and jQuery

I’ve spent the past couple weeks tooling around in my spare time with OO JavaScript, jQuery and jQuery UI. It’s been monsterous fun, and the result is a simple JavaScript chess game, which uses a bit of all three.  As the title implies, this lead me to remember a few simple truths when working with JavaScript and [...]

Taking Back the Blog

This little blog has sat dormant long enough (I didn’t even properly finish the Peru trip… *shame*). I’m going to start taking it back and publishing my thoughts about web development. I can’t say they’ll be deep and insightful, but I’ll try to keep it to stuff I would want to read myself.