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Interesting discoveries #06

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Bunch of links this post is. Here lies key things I have read:

1. Marriage equality, same-sex

Ruling that same sex marriage is unconstitutional in America. The New Yorker has a good summary on the key arguments for same-sex marriage.

There really is very little you can argue against same sex marriage without sounding like a selfish jerk.

2. Dog loves guitar

This is too cute to not watch:

Dogs make me laugh.

3. White noise to increase your creativity

This is a website with audio that mimics a cafe. Some Singaporeans would say they get more productive at Starbucks or the likes. Really? Perhaps so. Research has suggested some white noise to be good for creativity. Although I don’t really believe the assessment, here’s a coffee shop background sound you may need one day.

4. On why I start not reading news news

At some point of time in my life, I realized it’s just impossible to catch up with all the news in the world. They are things that are nice to know that is happening but I argue that it is less important than you think. Important news come to you in the old fashion way — word of mouth.

Today’s mainstream news is filled with articles that embraces the negative aspects. There’s always an accident here, a murder case, embezzlement etc.. There just isn’t enough good news except for our Prime Minister planting a lovely bush at the gardens to commemorate some special day that the generation in the future will call history.

News isn’t all that bad though. Just read lesser. For me, it’s a lot lesser. And stop reading about mishaps of others and surround yourself with more positivity. Read social news briefly. Then do your stuff in life. Don’t ever read The Straits Times.

5. The worst URL

Channel News Asia wins this hands down. What is this:

www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporebusinessnews/view/1262412/1/.html

I’m talking about /.html.

Come on, you can do better than this. What kind of CMS output such garbage?!

On the dismissal of Google Reader

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On one hand I’m tremendously shocked that Google would end a service that people relied on so much, and the other they do have the right to terminate anything that they are giving out for free.

The “Don’t be evil” argument is not even remotely related this so people who bring this up time and again are just whiners, or worse.

Google Reader has been in my Chrome most visited website for years and I would faithfully just click on it when I’m bored to see the list of content providers whose RSS I have subscribed to.

It does make me have lesser faith on Google services though. When would they call an end to life for Gmail perhaps? Will I continue to use free web services? Yes, only to get scalded once more.

Tools of the trade

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This is a quick update of the tools I used these days. I am a web user interface developer now so some of these tools might be kinda niche!

  • Text editor: SublimeText 2, because it loads fast and I swear by its open by file name feature
  • Computer: MacBook Air 13″, a decent screen size with good portability. I like working at cafés and this gadget fits my lifestyle.
  • Browser: Chrome 25. I lost track of Chrome’s version, comes with Chrome is the excellent debugger I cannot live without.
  • CSS generator: Less, because Less can be compiled by JavaScript on the client side. It’s easy to get started developing.
  • Revision control: Git or SVN. My vote is to Git but my company is on SVN.
  • Image editor: Photoshop. We use Photoshop for general slicing.
  • Programming and markup languages: Mainly JavaScript, HTML and CSS. We have quite a bit of Handlebars.js stuff as well. We use JavaScript extensively these days.
  • JavaScript framework: Backbone.js and Marionette.
  • Web server: Apache Tomcat. We have a Java stack.
  • Page profiling: Just Chrome.
  • Automation: Ruby Guard and Grunt.js. There’s a bit of LiveReload as well, but only when I develop on a Mac.
  • Quality checks: JShint and Chrome Audit in the console.

I can see what I use previously as a more general web developer.

Books I bought that I haven’t read

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I bought a bunch of books in the past, I never had the time to read them. Or at least that’s the excuse. Here’s a list of books I haven’t read to make myself guilty:

  • JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford: They say this is an excellent book. I will not know. You know what, actually I didn’t even know I have this book. It’s a huge surprise for me; I love surprises. (I do UI.)
  • The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: Is the movie better or is the book? I wouldn’t know, haven’t experienced either. That said I know more of the plot than most people think because everyone’s feeding me information and I sort of piece them all together.
  • Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler: I lent it to two of my friends and they read it for me. I haven’t read this myself but its worth has been validated at the very least.
  • A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis: I’m really about to start this. Really. Two years ago. Back then I was really wondering if I have the capability to fall in love. This isn’t as relevant as back then.
  • Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones: Loving the movie doesn’t translate to loving the book. I really what I most love about the story is really the characters and watching them come to film in the Hayao Miyazaki’s version made them so loveable I didn’t need to read the book. Honestly I couldn’t get past a quarter of the book.
  • The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan: I struggled through this book. I noted time and again that I can’t read books that have this politics thing inside. I keep accepted the challenge and attempting to overcome it with limited success.

Okay enough of embarrassment. I’m reading Sarah Silverman’s book now.

Why CSS buttons aren’t used enough

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I know CSS buttons exists, are really faster and not enough sites are using it. Let me try to explain on the different point of views. I am a Web UI Developer

UI Designer

They care the most on the look and feel of the button. They add shadows, a gradient and a beautiful texture. It’s the perfect button, in PNG. Well they send you in PNG, they design it in Photoshop. They most likely wouldn’t know CSS. They send you the button as part of a larger image to slice and implement. Their job is to make the UI look great, not to be concerned with speed of page rendering and assets delivery. They believe someone will take care of it.

Web UI Developer

Our interest is to finish up the task and make it look like the design. We could implement a button with CSS but we don’t know the shadow and border radius involved. We could ask the UI Designer but that takes an email and we might have to tone down the UI Designer’s button design. It’s a lot easier to deliver the button in an image format than to go through the hassle. We are slightly more concern with the speed but we don’t want to compromise on other’s work.

QA Engineer

This person is there to make sure that the Web UI Developer implements stuff correctly. That means the design of the button must look right in various browsers and platforms. The image format would look exactly like the mockup, it’s something QA Engineers would prefer. QA’s priority is to make sure the button is implemented as specified. Often speed of delivery is not in the specification.

DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer will look at the page and scan through and announce that image compression is needed to speed up the delivery of the webpage. He or she will then announced that after compression, the website is now 23% smaller and provide advice on compress images and CSS during the build process. The CSS button issue will fade away because everyone things compression is good enough a solution.

How to make it work better

The UI Developer probably has to step up and advice the changes being the interface between all parties. Perhaps they can be incentives towards better speed and performance. It’s a metrics that is not emphasized.