Glen Elkins’ Blog
What camping has taught me about coding
Self-reliance is overrated.
A typical Colorodan’s fantasy: you’re a rugged mountain man, completely self-reliant, living off the land. You’re exploration knows no bounds. You travel light, and make due with the things that are naturally at your disposal. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Wrong.
I’m my experience, both as a youngish coder and a relatively newbie backpacker, it’s much better to ask for help. By leaning on my friends and cohorts, I’ve been able to do things I would have never imagined possible in both arenas. Sure, being a bearded badass in the forest is an appealing fantasy, but I’ve found I like it in the movies much more than I do in real life. In real life, there are times I need help. There are problems that I’m not sure how to solve, projects that are too big for me to handle, and often issues I need someone else to bounce my thoughts against.
The art of asking for help has been my single greatest skill I’ve learned since I graduated college. Like many young professionals, generally inept and extremely self conscious, I tried to pretend to know things I didn’t. That may work well enough to land a job, but the shortsightedness offered by that strategy is quickly revealed.
Perseverance pays off.
If you’re on a hike and you roll your ankle (which has happened to me many embarrassing times), you might feel like calling it day. At that moment, simply sitting down and gorging yourself on water sounds extremely appealing (yet unproductive). Although you may want to quit, it’s an easy urge to resist, because it’s obvious you have little choice but to keep trekking. If you quit in the middle, you’ll just end up cold and hungry later, and that’s no fun. So you simply keep moving, even though it sucks.
The same is true in coding. If you’ve taken on a project and encountered a roadblock, the tendency to check Facebook or email is super-appealing, but it’s obvious what you really should do. Procrastination only delays the inevitable, so why even bother with that clean inbox? You’ll just end up cold and hungry later.
You’re here by choice, act like it.
When it comes down to it, whether it’s a tough day-hike or a tough web app, you’ve signed up for it on your own because it’s what you want to do. There’s no gun to your head. You get to sit in a nice office and write code all day, and that’s pretty cool.
The Demise of the Hgroup
I rarely find myself trolling html5 blogs and resources, unless I’m troubleshooting an issue. When I started to research HTML5 more than two years ago, the spec was already well on it’s way (or seemed to be). I took the reasonably complete spec to heart, committed it to memory, and have been using it ever since. Today I got a small reminder that HTML5, and the web in general, is an evolving entity, that requires constant supervision, otherwise, you’ll get left in the dust. Continue reading “The Demise of the Hgroup” »
Square peg vs. round hole
Earlier tonight I was stopped in a grocery store parking lot by a young man asking for money. He didn’t seem like a bum or anything, he was clean shaven, well dressed, and honestly seemed pretty desperate. “Are you the type of person that would help a person out if they needed something?” he asked. “Sure,” I thought to myself… but all I replied was “What’s up?” incredulously, as I held two bulging shopping bags in my hands.
He said he was traveling with his girlfriend from Austin, TX but had unfortunately ran out of gas a few hours ago. They were “so close” to getting enough to keep moving, and did I have some cash for them? As I reached into my pocket to fish out my wallet, he kept on, “…and we’ve been driving all day and are really looking to get a hotel room.”
He lost me. Did he need gas money or money for a hotel? That incongruous tidbit spoiled the whole encounter. He may have very well been a dude, down on his luck, but I couldn’t really tell. I don’t have a ton of cash usually, and not the kind of hand-out-to-strangers cash that would make such a decision easy, but my mind was made up at the moment he told me two purposes for this phantom money I was to give him.
It’s a fact that’s as true on the web as it is in real life: people don’t like incongruity. If something smells “off,” it’s only natural to bail.
The web isn’t made of paper
There’s been a lot of banter lately about “flat” design. Wells Riley rightly points out the dialogue has missed a key component: usability is what matters, not aesthetic. As a front-end developer, I see a lot of designs but don’t usually partake in any aesthetic critiques. That’s left for interweb trolls and real designers. My professional life revolves around bringing flat PSD layers to life. It’s exciting because I get an early glimpse at web products and watch them as they unfold from a static design, to living, breathing applications.
This is when the true usability of a design starts to take form. As the ugly real-world butts heads against the pretty garden of design, real content replaces lorem ipsum, dynamic images replace iStock’s glossy photos, and jaggy webfonts replace their Photoshop equivalents.
This is when we can start to see what the design is really going to look like to users and you can start to gauge whether the designer has created an elegant experience, or a pretty picture. And that brings me to my point:
The web isn’t made of paper
A lot of web design advice I see can be boiled down to one principle: The web isn’t paper.
The need to create a great user experience means that we can’t afford to just draw pretty pictures that fail to be useful. It’s nice when something looks great, but it’s essential that things work great. This is as true for “flat” design as it is for skeomorphism. The problem with both, is that they fail when the design fails.
Neither aesthetic can rescue a cluttered UI from a confused forest of icons, neither can justify long load times, or make up for poor layout. This sounds obvious, but humans still think of a computer screen as a digital sheet of paper. That viewpoint made a lot of sense some years ago when the web was largely made up of glorified text documents, but now it’s grown into so much more. We’ve become a bunch of Morty Seinfelds, considering a shiny new day planner nothing more than a tip calculator.
Just like Mort, we’re missing the forest for the trees. Although we consciously know that the web provides the opportunity for multi-layered, complex interaction, we continue to focus on aesthetics, to troll on about shading colors and graphic patterns. These things have their place, but they come and go with time. We’d be much better off spending some of our energy focused on the UX of an application and ignoring the aesthetics a little bit.
That’s enough, Bruno
Just thought this needed to be said: http://www.glenelkins.com/dropbox/thatsenough.html
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
I’ve been working in the tech industry for over four years now, and within that time one thing has remained constant: it’s not what you say, but how you say it.
Normal office politics aside, being able to communicate effectively with your cohorts is a valuable skill, and one that I have had to learn through experience. Group projects in school don’t prepare you for the long-term hierarchical dynamic you find in a typical office. You don’t plan on seeing a classmate after the semester’s over, and typically you’re not accountable to anyone in the group (just the professor).
By nature, I’m a pretty shy person. When I have something to say, I say it, but by and large, I’ve had to force myself to speak up during group meetings, or more personal pow-wows with a co-worker. It takes me a long time warm up to a social/professional situation an feel comfortable speaking freely. When you’re shy like me, speaking clearly and with tact is even more important.
Tact. That’s the name of the game. It’s not enough to have a great idea, you have to put your audience in a situation where it’s easy to accept a great idea. To get them on board, you need to know how to reach them. This is true in business and elsewhere in life and is probably just part of growing up.
Being confidently tactful is a learned skill, but it’s something I’m learning that pays in spades once you get a handle on it.
Why does everyone think I’m an asshole for not having a TV?
Perhaps my title has a bit of hyperbole, but it’s true! I don’t pay for cable and I don’t I have the 5 local channels in my apartment, and people plainly think I’m an asshole for it. They probably think I’m some neo-intellectual who is trying to enact some half-smart vision of what I might consider an enlightened existence.
Why don’t I have a TV? When TV, as I had grown up to know it, disappeared in 2008 (antenna broadcasts were replaced by a mess of digital converter what-whoozels) I refused to pay $40 for the technology that enabled me to watch the shitty local programming I’d always gotten for free.
Truth be told, I watch more programming than I ever have before, and I would still kill for cable or even normal TV, but it isn’t worth the price. I watch streaming services (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, etc…) and my monthly bill doesn’t even come close to what cable would rack up to in my area. Whatever those don’t cover I acquire by other means… I’m sort of ashamed to say. I’m not alone in protesting that if I had a viable option to pay for all the content I’d like to watch, I would.
Take HBO: That’s some of the best programming I’ve ever seen in my life. I am hopelessly addicted to Boardwalk Empire. If I could pay HBO a reasonable subscription fee I would in a heartbeat. The time savings I’d incur from not having to track the show down online would make it well worth a “normal” streaming charge (round $8-$12/month). Hell, they could even serve me ads after I pay them if they want (I’m looking at you Hulu Plus), I don’t care. Instead, to watch HBO online, I’d need to buy cable, then buy a HBO package, and THEN buy the privilege to then watch it online. What gives?
Isn’t it just a matter of time when content providers will realize a screen is a screen, regardless of the method of delivery? Why not treat them all basically the same? How long will we have to wait?
Back to my original point, people think I’m some hipster elitist who scoffs at the idea of frying my brain with an afternoon of cartoons, when in fact I love doing precisely that. It’s time to change our vocabulary. TV no longer exists. we’re plugged in 24/7 and have access to content whenever we want. When will everyone else catch up?
How photo filters are aging us
I was a 90′s kid. I spent my childhood decked out in Ninja Turtles garb and collecting baseball cards. These relics of the recent past often com to haunt our present as nostalgic reminders of who we once were, and by contrast how far we’ve come across the brief expanse of time. These are the kinds of things that age generations, everybody has their own “Ninja Turtles.”
This decade’s “Ninja Turtles” is is far more subtle, but also much more pervasive: photo filters. Continue reading “How photo filters are aging us” »
Notes on being a professional
I recently discovered The Design Pro Show, a design-centered advice video blog from Andy Rutledge of unit interactive. Although I’m not a freelance designer, and I don’t work for a design firm, I found a lot of useful advice from his videos. My work publishes web content and develops software, and I’ve found treating product managers like freelance clients solves a lot of potential problems.
With that perspective, I started to jot down the important things I heard Rutledge discuss in a google doc for my own use.
Today I’ll share my notes. I figure since these ideas and guidelines have been invaluable to me, other designers who don’t want to watch hours of video may benefit from it as well. Continue reading “Notes on being a professional” »
About Me
I'm a front end web developer for the digital marketing agency Room214.com and writer for the music blog PlaybackSTL.com.
When I'm not scribbling wireframes, tweaking CSS, or trying to find yet-another way to describe sounds with words, I doodle, play guitar, try to write and kill zombies.