The Wilson Project Blog of UX/Front-End Developer Ivan Wilson

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Tag Archive / web development

  • Coding The Problem

    There is this “thing” that has been nagging me for almost a year.

    Basically, it’s a conversion that I had with a CEO of a company. Anyways, during the course of the conversation, he brings out this remark:

    “Your job is to code, just like the designer’s job is to design.”

    That comment bothered me. It wasn’t a comment bore of malice or ignorance. It had some truth to it. But it missed an important point. It was the equivalent of saying “My job is to write HTML.”

    Now, there’s nothing bad; that is part of my job. But only a part.

    No, my annoyance is this:

    If my job was just coding, then I’m not doing a good enough job.

    OK. Let me explain.

    Coding is (relatively) easy. Businesses can pick and choose what company or freelancers to do the work. For a cheap price, the work can be farmed out to anyone of the many off-shore companies at will.

    Altogether, that the big talent pool of coding talent.

    You, (client/CEO) have to go through this massive pool to find the right person. But that is not what you are looking for. The truth is that you are not looking for someone to code.

    You need someone to solve your problem.

    As for coding? It’s a means to an end. Employers don’t hire people who code; they hire people who can solve their problems. (And also it’s the same thing that will keep them around…)

    Now, I wish he was around when I said this. I have no doubt that both of us would be agreement.

    There was another thing that he said, in jest, but in hindsight just as important. Basically, people like myself like the “shiny, new projects”. And yes, I admit, they are the nice ones to work on.

    But. There is a group of problems, the “old – fixed it just for now” problems that really need attention. The ones that are begging for someone to just look at and say “you know, if you give me some time, I think I could make this better.”

    There are lots of those problems that need serious attention, not the million dollar, new app of the month ones.

    Then, there is The Content Problem.

  • Post Ottawa

    Three months between posts. Sorry for the long delay. Been rebuilding…

    Conferences

    Conferences in late 2013

    Earlier in the year, I went to the IxDA Interaction 13 conference in Toronto, Canada. I have two more conferences for this year.

    Next week, An Event Apart DC in Alexandria, VA (another serving…).

    Then, in late October, CSS Dev Conference near Denver, Colorado.

    Charles

    View of Charles

    As of this entry, finishing contruction/testing of the WordPress theme. Will be writing blog entries related to the whole history/process of Project Charles. Debuting on Monday, August 5.

    August is going to be a busy month…

  • What is Project Ottawa?

    a method of building a visual model of an web application UI/front-end layer

    During the past four months, I have been presenting previews of sketches and notes from my notebook via Flickr.

    Preview Sketches:

    Project Ottawa [or the Ottawa model/diagrams] started in late February, prior to my trip to Ottawa for Jonathan Snook’s SMACSS Workshop. It was there that I did the first initial sketches post-workshop and a few weeks later, created the first draft.

    After some review and criticism from a fellow co-worker, I decided to work on the second draft. This took more twice as much time as the first, with testing and constant revisions. However, at this point, I am writing the final pages and presenting the Second Draft as a microsite in early/mid July.

    The Model

    In short, the model is based on a) recent work on modularizing CSS (via Nicole Sullivan, Jonathan Snook and etc), b) analog to linear algebra, most specifically linear transforms, and c) my ideas on the UI layer, based on a concept called The Information Layer.

    With these three items, I designed a visual “code” with symbols representing blocks of programming code and content. By examining mostly my own work, I developed the rules and basics to use the symbols to represent not the parts of the web application system, but also describing interactions withing the system.

    The original purpose of this was archival, record keeping for myself. However, I began to realize that there was nothing out there that visually describes the work that FEDs [front-end developers] were doing. We have code and and can talk about CSS, HTML, etc. But, maybe for the first time, there was something that allowed the work to be visualized and be more tangible.

    Status

    Currently, this is the second draft. Even though models are always being revised and changed, I kept the term “draft” because I wanted to present the working model in a state that was good enough for demonstrations. However, this draft appears, so far, to be close to being stable. Naturally, there is more work in the near future.

    Final Preview

    As I mentioned before, the final document will be presented as a microsite around early/mid July.

    Before that, I created a single page preview, giving a brief overview of the model and its use in “mapping” a single page, AJAX driven site. This is based on the sketches/drawing from the last Flickr preview and the same example will be used as a case study in the final document/microsite.

    Final Preview – Modeling a single page, AJAX driven site