I'm not dead, just evolving.
Dear lord it has been a long time since I have posted anything. In the past I used my blogs mostly for the purpose of talking about technical things I've discovered or accomplished but thats changing. I feel like I have so many conversations in my head about ideas or choices I need to make in life that I kind of just want to muse about them out in the open for all to see.
Could that wind up having terrible consecuences? Sure, probably. Then again I don't have a comment system in place so internet trolls be damned. I think at this point I would be more flattered than angry that someone would spend their time being a jerk than anything else.
The Last Year (or so), Professionally
I'd be lying if I said it has been the way I envisoned it especially after that vision was altered from spending two great years essentially interning for Mozilla (sort of, kind of... it's complicated). Since then I have worked with four different companies for varying lengths of time and other than one none of them were/are ones that I truly saw/see the employment as anything other than a stopgap. Other than the aforementioned one of four jobs I basically never felt like any of them were enjoyable or things I wanted to do long term and eventually left them for reasons of my own accord.
I don't exactly take my decisions to leave those companies lightly as if it didn't affect their goals as well. Any place of employment that hires you for actual full time work makes an investment in you to be able to help them accomplish their own goals and leaving those companies on your own accord without considering that is a selfish thing to do. Ultimately for me each place I left completely on my own accord had something about the situation that I just couldn't handle anymore and forced me to move towards looking elsewhere.
Sadly I find myself still in this situation feeling like I'm in somewhat of a tailspin, doubting myself and questioning what I should do next (which, I suppose is actually normal). How do I know that shifting from any current job I have to another in the same field would actually remedy the situation? Have I made the wrong career choice? Should I throw it all away and start again with something else? It's been so tempting to try and get a job in the hospitality/enterainment field with B.A.T.L but when none of those jobs exist with their three Toronto locations I find it incredibly hard to convince myself to attempt something as crazy as that despite how enjoyable it may be.
In the end though I know that staying the course is the right thing for me to do because deep down I know I do enjoy solving peoples problems and helping them the way I do. I have managed to learn a lot about myself and the things I want in employment through introspection and these previous employeers that help me push through the crap. These include:
- I need to be working fairly constantly. I feel the worst about myself and situations when my brain isn't being stimulated.
- I can't work on throw away projects, ideas or quick turn around client work. My work has to hold some sort of meaning.
- I'm a weird guy who to a lot of people I probably come off as brash/anti social. The truth is the opposite if you are someone I actually open up to. Basically I can't work with a bunch of people just like me, otherwise the working dynamic tends to be kind of odd.
- I desperately need to be able to work from home whenever I feel the need to. I don't want to be someone who is 100% remote because I feel as if I would go stir crazy but need the flexibility. It's hard to state the value in being able to recharge like that for me.
- Challenged. Probably the worst part of the last year is that I don't feel like I've picked up many new skills and have just "spun my tires" with things I already knew. Sure this does mean I have a lot more practical experience to show but that doesn't mean I can't be pushing myself to expand my skill set often.
Man, after going through with that I sound like a total prick to work with probably. I promise I'm not but in the end thats just how I know I work most effectively.
One of the most frustrating things I find is working in closed environments and then trying to apply to jobs at all these great startups/companies out there. When I was working full time on Mozilla projects I had a portfolio just sitting there for anyone to check out and see what I've done. Now? It looks like I have done absoleutly nothing for the last year because while I lvoe programming it isn't a consistent hobby so I don't tend to do much of it outside work. I fear this impedes me from even being considered for positions at other amazing companies and it is honestly quite depressing. Is this mostly just perceived by my own doubts? That is way too difficult to say but it's something that weighs on me regardless.
The Last Year (or so), Personally
Not everything is quite so bad. While this section will be shorter (mainly because I keep a simple life) I like to believe that the last year has been great in my personal life. I've delt with the standard self doubting but continued to learn more about what really makes me happy. Most importantly being happy with who I actually am and not worried about the opinions of others who so clearly don't give two shits. That in itself is probably the hardlest lesson anyone can learn.
As said, I would rather do some quick bullet point style highlights in this section so... lets get to it!
- Probably met more genuine and amazing people that I actually consider friends than ever before. Many thanks to the aforementioned community of B.A.T.L and others.
- The fact that I just generally seem to have better control of myself/who I am. Many days in the past it was pretty difficult to contain my own emotions about all the shit going on in my head but I have a far better grasp on things to be certain.
- Re introducing an active healthy life style back into the normal routine. This includes not drinking nearly as much (which sounds bad but it wasn't), a high protein diet and 8 hours a week at the gym with 2 nights a week throwing axes. Okay throwing axes probably doesn't count since we drink beer then but regardless I have managed to drop 8% body fat and 14 pounds over the last few months plus whatever gain in muscle mass I could. Feeling great has its psycological benefits.
- Pet ownership is pretty cool.
- Relationships are fairly cool.
- Making actual more long term commitments. At least, I like to think of tattoos as pretty long term.
How on earth did we get here?
Yeah, I don't really quite remember where this all started. In truth this is something I wrote over a couple of days and just never hit the publish(commit) button but the mind dump feels good. I hope to be posting regularly again with more concise thoughts!
- Tagged in personal and life.04 Mar 2014
Search through your terminal history for commands
This one's going to be short and sweet but I wanted to share a quick thing I've learned about that's made my life running numerous apps from the terminal much easier. I'm going to call it search through your command history. It's pretty awesome.
Basically, hit CTRL + R (at least on a Mac, using the stock Terminal app with Bash) and you can just start typing the name of the command you are searching for. It will auto populate it with a matching command and you can just hit enter to run it!
- Tagged in terminal, bash, and efficiency.
09 Jan 2014
Dynamic Duration and Popcorn Maker
Small post, but wanted to bring to the attention of anyone who reads this that actually uses Mozilla's Popcorn Maker that I just recently landed a long over due feature/performance fix being dubbed Dynamic Duration!
What exactly is Dynamic Duration?
Good question! Previously whenever changes needed to be made to the base timeline's length ( a Null Video using Popcorn.js ) we would essentially have to destroy the tracking popcorn instance and recreate it with a base media that had a sufficient duration. This was really awful for performance because any trackevents that required AJAX calls of any sort would have to be redone because events were being recreated just so the project could be in it's previous state data wise. It was annoying/noticable enough for people who have good connections but was at a near "game stopper" for anyone who didn't have a great connection because it would be such a strain on network performance. On top of that there was a somewhat anoying UI quirk of seeing the timeline briefly hide itself only to almost instantly reappear.
As of today however, these are problems of the past! Hooray for performance increases. Please file bugs if you notice any issues!
- Tagged in Webmaker, Popcorn Maker, and Popcorn.js.12 Dec 2013
Wait, I can style my Chrome DevTools?!?!
HOLY CRAP THIS IS AMAZING
So, I've always had one major gripe with using Chrome's dev tools and that's the absurd amount of white that is in them. It really strains my eyes after a long day of staring and my screens. I needs some contrast! That's when I discovered this blog post by Darcy Clarke that showed me I could actually style them myself!
Themes
It's really evident that I am super late to this party but I couldn't be happier. I then found this website called DevThemez that had a lot of the theme's I'm used to in other applications already made for me. This was especially great because they all also have CSS built for other parts of the DevTools like the Sources/Debugging tab (which I make heavy use of).
Anyway, small post but honestly one of the coolest and most useful things I have found in a while!
- Tagged in chrome and devtools.05 Dec 2013
Setup VMs for your IE Testing Pleasure
Greeting's all! This will be a relatively short post but aimed with some hopefully useful content to you. Thankfully I've had the privilege of being able to avoid testing/supporting IE a decent bit in my career thusfar but times are a changing and I have some code reviews on me for testing fixes in IE10 with one coming up shortly for IE8!
In the past I simply used a Windows PC next to me but I haven't reliably kept that machine up and running so I decided to move to using Virtual Machine's instead as they are a really handy and powerful alternative to actually having multiple machines around with different operating systems installed. I'm going to go over a few quick steps I took to being able to have a VM running Windows 7 with IE10 already prebuilt for me on my Macbook. If you'd like to read a little bit on what virtual machine's are in the first place, read here to do so!
The VM Software
There are all kind's of alternative's out there that can suite different use cases. For me I needed something easy to use, setup and that allowed me to be up and running in a relatively short amount of time. I went with VirtualBox because it not only does all of the aforementioned amicably but it's also multi platform and open source!
Obtaining and Using the Images
Getting useful images for Windows can be a real PITA compared to say Linux but thanks for the people of modern.IE it's really simple to have Windows downloaded, installed and running the desired version of Internet Explorer in no time. You have multiple options here to download everything but since I'm using a UNIX based system and am slowly becoming a command line junky I'm going to go with what is probably the easiest and quickest solution.
First you are going to need to open your favourite terminal application. I personally just stick with the Terminal app that comes installed on OSX but whatever you fancy should work just fine. Next you need to navigate to wherever you plan on keeping all of your VMs on your machine ( I made a folder called VMs in my Documents ).
modern.IE has a really useful way of installing everything for UNIX based systems ( or anything that has access to a cURL like command ) that allows me to download everything at once. Once you have selected a desired testing OS ( Mac, in my case ) and the VM platform you are using ( Virtual Box, in my case ) your page should look something like:
From there all you need to do is click on the desired Grab them all with cURL link and copy the command given. For example, if we selected IE10 - Win 7 our command would look like the following below. Once you paste that in your terminal just hit enter and all the neccesary files will be downloaded!
curl -O "https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VirtualBox/OSX/IE10_Win7/IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part{1.sfx,2.rar,3.rar,4.rar}"
Extracting and running the Image
After it's done downloading the necessary files we need to extract it all so we can run it in VirtualBox. First, we need to set permissions on the .sfx file that
was downloaded and afterward's it's as simple as running that executable. This is a two step process ( or one, if you like chaining commands together ), like so:
chmod +x ./IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part1.sfx && ./IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part1.sfx
After that it's as simple as double clicking the generated .ova file ( in this case, IE10.Win7.For.Mac.VirtualBox.ova ) and it will auto open in VirtualBox.
From there you can always change a few settings ( increasing the available RAM is a good choice ) but that's basically all you have to do! If you want to read up a little more on this,
check out this helpful blog post I found that really made the process easy for me to
do.