programming

Using Photoshop's scripting support to address disconnects between art production and legacy code for a large-scale consumer-facing website, complete with some open-source code for you.

As a followup to my earlier post, I'm going to assume that based on my previous thoughts you've now gone to your management team and advocated successfully for some work-from-home days in your life. More likely, of course, is that you're fortunate enough to be in a corporate environment where remote work is already embraced, whether that's for just some days during the week or month, or all of them.

And the time is still now, even if you're in a different time zone from all of your coworkers!

As someone who works remotely, I find that it can be easy to forget the rubber duck. Being alone in an office all day and not one particularly given to talking to myself, I find that it can be hard sometimes to not fall into a gap in my thought process which precludes the rubber duck situation.

I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.

A couple months back, I read in Wired (in hard copy, no less, because I'm one of those weirdos) Clive Thompson's column "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding". It resonated with me at the time, but I sat on the article until I could also link to it, and now it's too late to really weigh in on it, because as soon as it hit the web it blew up. The post has nearly 125k shares on Facebook as I write this, in fact, and way more Facebook comments than any of their recent posts that don't involve America's President.

A while back, I had a project in which I had a series of buttons that needed to be styled in a rainbow of candy colors, for a list of items that all lead to different spots in the same content hierarchy. The design mockups I was given for the project were detailed but did not appear to be internally consistent from color to color; the base colors were chosen from a brand guide, but the guide did not provide any detail for how to lighten or darken the colors for user interaction states. I started by developing CSS to match the mockups, but the problem kept gnawing at me.

The "Arkeg" is, as you might be able to suss out if you think long enough, a combination of a stand-up arcade game cabinet plus a "kegerator," another portmanteau describing a mini-fridge with a small keg of beer inside. This is, in fact, a real thing, and it's one that will set you back roughly four thousand dollars. But not the one you'll read about here!