BUGS … I feel like I’ve said a dirty word. Don’t talk about it, it’ll only depress you. But they’re not that big a deal, it’s just a part of development, we should just get on, persevere and clean them out. We probably waste more energy worrying about them than we would dealing with them sooner rather than later.
In a larger team, this can be heightened when the bugs are as a result of someone else’s code. We become even more resistant to digging in to resolve them. We even see them as blockers to us completing our own tasks. This is crazy, are we not a team, we’ve got the same end goal.
Over the last couple of days for some reason I decided to use earphones rather than
my usual headphones when I needed to concentrate and wanted to listen to some music.
It is such a small subtle change but I’ve been amazed at how it has released more
creativity and free thinking. Why is that?
I’ve been discussing this with Stuart Harris who
works from my office as a health, wellness and performance coach. An interesting guy
to have these kinds of discussions with.
It was great to be have Robin Stanley join me at the end of October. He joined us in our little office for a weeks work experience. I have never had a student work with me before so it was a bit of a leap in to unknown territory but I had a few thoughts as to how I could help him.
If I think back to what has helped me most in the past, I think of particular projects or problems which I had to work out. For me learning through real-life tasks has been the most effective way.
NB. This is an article I wrote a while back for .net magazine which seems to have disappeared when they transitioned to Creative Bloq
Every creative discipline has their own set of good practices and principles. They have evolved over time and are generally born out of common challenges that people in each industry face. I think there are many things we can learn from each other across the disciplines.
I have recently moved house and family away from London. It’s been a mixed experience leaving behind the on-the-doorstep opportunities of London and searching for new ways to be part of the web community. I’ve had a few big decisions to make, and in the process have met some really great people.
Pogo Kid
I decided that I couldn’t just let Pogo Kid go for the safety of a permanent role. I was sad to have to turn down a couple of really great opportunities but am excited about what I might be able to build. So I am now based just outside of Bath, England and working from a shared creative space in town.
I have been working with Canvas 2D and WebGL recently and have been
using Maths I never expected to see again once I left school. One
thing that has been really useful when turning mathematical functions
in to something visual is to see a graph representation of the values.
I have created a [simple graphing playground](/teststation/creative-
js/grapher/2d.html) to test out these functions and compare them to
each other. You can see below the difference between the sin, cos
and tan functions alongside the ImprovedNoise generator built in
to Three.js.
It was a close call because 2 weeks before our flight, after a long search and two false starts we hadn’t found someone to live with us in Toronto and watch the kids while we were in lessons. Of course we only wanted the best, our amazing kiddies are very much our priority and if we couldn’t find someone who would love them as well as look after them then it would be better to call the whole thing off. But we trusted that this was the right thing to do and sure enough in a few days we were introduced to the lovely Brittany who had been hoping for an opportunity like this. It was amazing how it all worked out.
I have been away from permanent developer work on a 5 month course focusing on character, leadership and identity and have been impacted so much by the experience.
I’ve really missed the people I used to work with over at Aqueduct, they’re flippin amazing. It has me thinking: I want to always surround myself with passionate people. Our personal lives affect the standard of work we produce and the level of creativity we put in to our daily routines. Here are a few things I am learning.
I have just finished my time at Aqueduct after two and a half years leading the front-end work there.
I leave very satisfied, after feeling like we’ve come a long way in that time and the path ahead for those guys is looking pretty exciting.
This small agency I joined has grown (and grown up) quite significantly over my time there. This has been credit to a number of people. For the dev team ask any of the developers that have gone through the agency over the last few years and they will all tell of how inspirational Guillaume is as a person and how he has built a dev team which is now fueling itself to do great work. He’s a good one for quotes and this was a gem recently:
I have just finished a project for Adam Ball who is an artist based in London. This has been a real challenge and has made me push boundaries in to new territory.
Responsive Design, Responsive Images
The main area has been with serving appropriate image sizes according to the device. I have previously talked about my responsive images jQuery plugin which is a good stop gap for getting this to work across the current browser landscape. I have liked working with responsive images in this way because it is a much more organic solution than the ones I have seen elsewhere. It’ll be great when we’ve got something natively to handle this sort of thing.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
