Author: Smokie

Happy Birthday to Me and a Year since Sir Terry Pratchett’s Death

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My birthday always makes me ponder the future and the past and my path and my existence. Makes me all existential as it were. I wonder if that happens to anyone else on their birthday.

A year ago today, my favorite author Terry Pratchett died. I hadn’t even looked at the news that day when I got up, and my husband came to me with an absolutely shocked looked on his face and asked me if I was okay; he thought I had seen it already. It was a shock to say the least, and was the final straw that threw me into what has been a year long soul searching episode. Well, likely longer, since I’m not really done searching my soul just yet…

Anyways, Sir Terry was an amazing author, and his books have been a part of my life almost as long as my second favorite author Stephen King. I grew up on Sir Terry’s Discworld and the antics of its denizens, and learned about life from those pages. It was a good 3 months before I could think about Sir Terry being dead without crying; I truly felt like I lost a family member.

I planned on doing some CSS stuff, maybe a drawing or two, but I have been sick this week with a damned cold that went through my family first so of course I got the ultra-hardy mutated version. Hopefully I’ll be done with my drawing tomorrow or Monday and can post it.

I would be a great fit for your company because…

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What the front-end applicant wanted

Hey, we know you, we follow you on Twitter and you’re a funny dude/tte with balling front-end skills. Applications are so boring and we don’t want to read them any more than you want to fill them out so join our Slack chat and get to know our team let’s see how we like you as a person. Oh, and if we decide not to hire you, we’ll be super honest about why so that you can learn and grow in your field, because we value our industry and our role in it as a support and mentoring system.

What the front-end applicant expected

Tell us why you’re interested in this job. Don’t be afraid to say, “Because you’re hiring!”; we understand that you probably came here from a job posting board and we want to give everyone the opportunity to work at our company, even if they weren’t familiar with us when they applied. Also tell us what you want out of your career. Don’t be afraid to say you eventually want to work at Google just because you want to work here. We understand that life is about change.

What the front-end applicant got

Tell us in 49-232 characters why you would be a good fit for our company. Be sure to use words and phrases you find in the 5 minutes browsing our company website and manifesto, because the robots we have screening the applications like buzzwords and we can’t expect you to stick around longer than that. After that be sure that you have a portfolio on Behance, even if you maintain an updated portfolio somewhere else. Individuality means everyone using the same tools. An active Dribbble profile automatically moves an application to the 2nd round of reviews, where an actual human sees it, so don’t even waste your time if you don’t have one. Also tell us an arbitrary fact about yourself to prove you were reading, even though we have a program to automatically reject or approve applications and this question is irrelevant to them.

Windowfy Sass Mixin

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In my travels around the internet, I see many interesting portfolios for both designers and developers. Often these portfolios include images of the web site or application as it would look in a desktop window, usually an OSX (Mac) window. I really liked the effect, and I wanted to recreate it in CSS. Once I had done that I thought it was pretty cool, and I wanted to share it so I made a Sass mixin, which proved to be more enlightening that I had originally anticipated.

Honestly, I think good relationships are harder than bad ones. I don’t mean cultivating them, obviously that’s harder, but I mean actually dealing with them day to day. When I get upset or irritated at my spouse, it’s a “but yet” type of thought: “Well, I do feel a little ignored since that video game came out, but yet, he does make sure I eat when I go on 9 hour coding binges…” When I was in a shitty relationship, it was more an “and also” thought: “Well, I do feel a little unappreciated since he cheated on me, and also he ate all my goddamned Doritos.”

First Evah CodePen Online Meetup

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So last week we had a CodePen online meetup. This was my first ever meetup, online or not, and it was FANTASTIC! We had to present something, and about 2 pens in I was doubting my abilities, but whatever. I’m sure someone out there is doing something similar and my pen helped them. See and read about the glory!

I had this typed up and didn’t post it, but rather saved it as a draft. Then I saw that they posted the video over on the CodePen blog, so I’ll just link to that. We plan on doing it again, so if you’re interested, keep an eye on the CodePen site for more information!

Footer?

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Does anyone give a shit about the things in the footer? Should I just put them in the menu? Decided to run Optimizely to test things out. WE WILL SEE HOW THIS SHIT GOES.

Journal #2: Process and Thread Scheduling

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NOTE: We use APA citations in my Master’s program, which I have retained here.

Entry #2 (although posted as the third…whoops…others are here) in my Operating System class. This time we are asked to examine our system’s process states using the command line. (This is to help us with our final project and recommending process management requirements to our fictitious organization. This class is also known as “OPS-prov”.) In Windows, that command is tasklist /v. We’re supposed to research what scheduling algorithm is used by our operating system as well. Let’s dive in.

Flat Solar System

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My daughter is learning about the solar system and other bits of astronomy in school, so I thought it would be fun to create a little CSS animation that shows how the orbits work. I found this image on Dribbble that I really liked the look of, and decided to recreate it in CSS. This served well enough to explain to her how much smaller than the sun we are, and the Earth’s place in the solar system. Right now of course, these orbits and sizes are not at all to scale, but maybe someday!