Tag: Development

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Adventure Books Development Projects Uncategorized

Recent Hobbies

I’ve found a few new hobbies/projects to learn during the recent pandemic. Some tech, some around the house, and others just random.

Vue.js

I’ve really gotten into the vue.js JavaScript framework. Recently I’ve been aiming to get stronger with JavaScript, and eventually found my way to Vue.

Thus far I’m using the framework to develop a degree/program finder at work, and another single page app for another project. I’ll have to write up a post on both projects when I launch them. Very excited.

Firebase

A bit tied together with my Vue interest, I’ve really been having fun with Firebase. Firestore and Authentication are what I’m mostly toying with at the moment. I am really excited to deploy into some final projects. The documentation is great.

Baseboard Trim

I finally put my miter saw to use and fixed the baseboard trim in my bathroom. Getting the trim to match at a corner was the biggest challenge.

Since some of the previous trim had gotten wet and moldy, I was able to salvage a piece of the clean original to match my corner, with a completely new piece of baseboard for the side with no corners. Very difficult to see the trim isn’t a perfect match on that piece.

Sprinkler Heads

Not too difficult, but I also dig up and replaced a few sprinkler heads. Installing and adjusting to get them just right wasn’t too hard. Just some trial and error, and digging.

RingFit Adventure

I have been playing RingFit Adventure for 90+ straight days now. While not a replacement for the gym, it’s been a pretty solid source of activity. It has me doing more core and balance work now, which is nice. Great idea making an exercise rpg, I think I’m up to level 106 now.

Kindle PaperWhite

One of the first (and few purchases) of the pandemic for me was a Kindle. It’s been awesome! Screen and battery are amazing, I’ve been borrowing books online through my local library. Probably have read 8 or so on it.

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Uncategorized

1st Week Working from Home

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic I started to work from home beginning last Wednesday. Work had been extremely busy and at times stressful dealing with the unique and trying situation, so social distancing is being put to the test.

Working on the web, my role translate favorably to a work at home schedule. My trusty MacBook Pro can handle any task I would have done in the office. So technology isn’t much of a concern. How things go without being able to interact directly with humans will be the true challenge.

The first few days were extremely busy. This in uncharted territory and our team is very busy and doing as best a job as we can given the circumstances. so even though I’m home, I’m still very much occupied.

I’m been able to communicate with the rest of my team via email and with our latest addition to our toolset, Microsoft Teams. When we found out late on Tuesday we would be working from home beginning the next name, I immediately had us setup some Teams and we gave ourselves a quick 10 minute run-through of how we may be able to use it from.

All things considering, it’s been working extremely well thus far. Everyone at our institution is available in the chat (assuming they’re using it), so that’s a huge plus for us. The video chat quality and ease of use has been most impressive. We have 14 users, with probably 10 or 11 using the video chat and the rest on audio chat with no issues. As clear as can be.

Microsoft Teams will officially be a part of my daily work going forward, even when we do return to the office. It’s been a great friend.

Work from Home Tools:

  • MacBook Pro 13″
  • Office 365
  • OneDrive
  • Google Drive
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Microsoft Teams
  • GitHub
  • A chair and table (it’s not a very comfy chair)
  • A place to stand and work (using an exercise mat to stand on really helps)

Supervising looks to be interesting. Teams has really done a solid job of making it not too awkward. We can have meetings without too much issue, sharing our screens when necessary, and just using old fashioned chat and link/file sharing to get the job done. Thus far not losing too much of a step.

The first week we were so busy in crisis mode, we didn’t have to get too creative in coming up with projects and managing folks. I’m sure the next days will be similar, but it will be interesting to see how it goes should things slow down. I’ve always been a self starter, but I’d like to see how everyone else adapts as well.

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Development

Cordova statusbar for iOS Plugin

Since iOS 7 was released a month or so ago I’ve been completely stumped with fixing my Cordova iOS app that relied on jQueryMobile. I couldn’t find a clean solution to fix the now changed handling of the statusbar in iOS 7. I had come up with some CSS hacks to work around, but was having a hard time getting my fixed headers to cooperate with jQueryMobile.

I finally noticed that a statusbar plugin had been released for Cordova (PhoneGap). I immediately went to the command line and added it to my project!

I did have a little bit of a time figuring out how to make my statusbar behave like an iOS 6 app. It turned out to be much simpler than I was expecting and of course I was over thinking it.

I just had to edit the config.xml file. In my case I set the preference tag “StatusBarOverlaysWebView” true and a custom color for the statusbar in the preference tag “StatusBarBackgroundColor” as well. Then the plugin worked it’s magic!

 

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Adventure Design Development

Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps

I really wanted to take a course on Coursera this summer to learn something new. Learning stuff for the sake of learning is great. So after checking out what was being offered this summer, Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps from the University of London International Programmes caught my eye. It sounded like some fun stuff.

The course was pretty nice. No additional materials were required besides downloading some open source software (Processing, Audacity, etc.). With video lectures posted every week and discussion forums to ask and answer questions.

The first week of the course started a bit rough. Setting up a working environment can always be tough, and it seemed that many were having similar issues in the forums. There were some coding errors in a few of the early examples that were giving me issues. Most notably the javascript examples. This was a pain to deal with, especially early on. But luckily, I’m a skilled enough coder already to of figured out and fixed it for myself. If I wasn’t already comfortable coding, I probably would have left the course though.

The remaining weeks the coding issues disappeared and it was much easier to follow along with the lectures. The video lectures were great and of very good quality. The instructors were easy to follow and a bit funny as well.

The quizzes and assignments were great too. Though I really aimed a bit too low with my first assignment, doing the peer reviews really had me step up what I’d do for my final assignment.

With the suggestion of a friend I decided to re-create Donkey.bas (the original DOS game) using Processing. I found a video of it being played on YouTube and just went from there.

It does have some gaming flaws as speed picks up still, and has been formatted to a mobile devices screen size. But overall I thought it turned out ok, and kept the cheesiness of an early 80’s DOS game.

All in all I was very satisfied with my experience with taking this class. If you’re into learning something new and don’t really care about a degree or grades to prove it (so overrated to me), then I can’t imagine there’s ever been a better time to gain new knowledge. It’s really an amazing time to be around with all the information so readily available.

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Development

visitavalonnj.com

visitavalonnj.comFinished up one of the cooler projects I’ve had the pleasure to work on a few weeks ago. The site is www.visitavalonnj.com.

I’ve worked with the client in the past and they were looking for a new site to help with the tourism of Avalon, NJ (a very nice place). Working with them is excellent and probably the best overall client relationship I’ve had to date. They know what that want, and present a professional design/concept and I build them a web solution to meet their needs.

In this case they really wanted a site that would be easy for them to maintain and add and edit content on a regular basis. Oh yeah, and they also needed it done before the start of their tourism season (middle of March ideally).

With only a few seconds into the conversation I knew that Drupal would be the perfect match for their needs.

Some modules featured in the creation of this project were:

  • Views – while I use it in every Drupal site I’ve ever worked on, it was heavily used in this project and really helped cut down on development time.
  • Calendar and Date – they needed an events calendar and the Calendar module was great to build upon. They also used dates with other content types and the Date module was a real life saver in these cases too.
  • Media – the client wanted the ability to add images inline view a wysiwyg editor. While still not a perfect solution, the Media module did help us give the client such a ability.
  • Facebook OAuth – they wanted users to have the option to login with their Facebook account instead of having to create a separate account for their site. This module was simple to set up and got the job done.
  • Google weather – this allowed us to easily bring in and display the latest weather in Avalon without too much hassle. Just some minor CSS tweaking was involved to get it done.
  • Social media – a very new module and it’s release was most timely. An excellent way to bring the now common social media button onto a website.
  • Webform – again a well known staple that just gets the job done.
  • Omega Theme – a real lifesaver for building a responsive web design. I highly recommend it as a starter theme for any new site.

The whole building block structure of Drupal really allowed us to deliver some cutting edge features without having to start from scratch. This really saved us a great deal in time and costs ($$$) and allowed me to concentrate more of the really unique aspects of the site.

Most impressive was how well the client has been able to use Drupal to manage the site. Our training simply consisted of a few minutes on a phone call. The admin interface was very intuitive to them and I did make sure to label all content types and fields so that each part was clear to them when it came time for them to manage the site.

Again, this was a pretty impressive project and and absolute treat to work with them again! I’m very impressed with it’s outcome and am very excited to check back with it’s performance in a few months.

Lots of fun.

Categories
Books

Programming the Mobile Web

Programming the Mobile WebIt’s still tough finding good sources of information when developing for the mobile web. I’ve found amazing resources if you’re developing native applications, but when developing mobile friendly sites it’s a different story.

Been reading Programming the Mobile Web and even though I still have a few chapters to go, must say that it’s a must own if you’re a web developer who is interested in making your site mobile friendly or even developing a mobile version of your site.

The book does a great job covering all the different platforms and browsers to account for (it’s so crazy how many there are) as well as best practices to handle all the variety out there. Even if you have a good understanding of developing for the mobile, I’m sure you’ll find a few useful tips along the way.

An excellent resource that I’m sure I’ll be opening up many times again long after I’m done reading through it.