Employers don’t know what to look for in Front-End development. We are still a frontier discipline. Just stay in the game and keep learning. The best way to market yourself is with a portfolio. Resumés and classes are not as important and good old fashioned experience. Go to github.com and forums and get involved in open-source projects. Learn from your mistakes because the true rules are yet to be written (and most likely never will be).

View LA Adventure: Dodger Stadium in a larger map

Starting In Union Station

We start at Los Angeles Union Station where we pick up the Gold Line heading North towards Sierra Madre Villa Station. Take the train one stop and Get out at the Chinatown Station

While in Chinatown
We stopped to get some grub. If you are not in a hurry it is worth taking a small detour to get a boba and something to give you the engergy you will need for the next 3/4 of a mile

For boba we stopped at
Lolicup

for boba and we got some delicious Chicken pies at

Wonder Bakery

Okay back on track

Walk down College street to Yale and make a right. You will eventually see a Walking bridge

just past the Moytel

a place that looks shady in a really cool way.

Cross the Walking Bridge and you will end up on Stadium Way

Make a right and start walking. You will pass a street named “Lookout” and some homes before finding the Dodger Stadium driveway on your left.

Welcome to Dodger stadium!

I am amazed at how difficult it was to find a easy route to Dodger Stadium. Keep in mind that stadium way and the Dodger Stadium driveway are not pedestrian friendly. I would be careful of cars and travel in a group at night. Parts of this trip is through some areas that can get sketchy at night.

Bonus Features

As promised, here are some of the interesting sights from the long route that Google Maps gave me.

Entering Chinatown from Hill Street

The non Walking Bridge way up Stadium Way

The 110 Freeway from the Stadium Way overpass

I love this tunnel.

Downtown from Stadium Way

This always reminds me of The Shield

Always make sure the stadium is open before you hike

Bring something to eat

We had Brown Rice cakes and Ginger from Dave’s Gourmet Korean Food

I will definitely be doing this trip again

The “X-UA-Compatible” tag will allow developers to target any specific version of IE that they feel will properly render their code. I think the “edge” option makes sense if you know that you will always be coding to proper standards and are prepared to test your site as new versions of IE are released. However, Aaron Gustafson, of A-List-Apart, made a good opposing point in his article that was later reinforced by Chris Wilson in the IEBlog. They suggest that it would be better form to always target a specific browser version so that you are not left scrambling to fix bugs every time a new version is released. Though I agree that this makes sense, why only one browser? I would feel a lot better if this was a more global option that was bound to a spec instead of a specific browser version. I would love for all  the browser manufacturers to extend Microsoft’s tag to be a more global tag, anything is possible right? Without a standardized tag, I fear we will have tags for every different a-grade browser and they will probably have their own conventions. I will just be an optimist on this one and hope our standards organizations have this one covered. Robert O’Callahan of mozillazine called Microsoft’s approach a “Maintenance burden” and I have to say that I agree that it will be a burden in it’s current form.

Finally, the two articles above that oppose using the “edge” option suggest that it will make code vulnerable to any new feature that is released by browser manufacturers. This has always been the case and it has bit me once or twice but I would hate to think that this approach will give the IE team license to release code that may not be ready for the wild. I would hope that the burden of quality testing is not being shifted from one development team to many developers and users.

It all started a year ago while I was in a period of high-stress and low-inspiration. In a desperate effort to be inspired, I was listening to a harrowing amount of web related podcasts, favoring The Rissington podcast and Boagworld. This was in addition to my eye-numbing list of RSS feeds in Google Reader. Over a weekend I followed the progress of some of the most influential bloggers and podcasters through SXSW 2008, and wished I was there in the panels and parties. The conversations that came out of that week in Austin seemed to generate a year of inspiration for me and I vowed that I would not be a spectator in 2009.

In the following months I convinced myself that this was something that I needed to sell to my employer. I knew the company would benefit as much as I would; but I was just not sure I could sell a 6 day conference in a time when we were, as a company, considering layoffs for the first time in many years. I am glad that I was willing to, and did, pay my own way. I then proceeded to convince my girlfriend (a fellow geek), that since we would be traveling together we would be saving a fortune. In fact, we can’t afford NOT to go. I am assuming by the easy sell that she really wanted to go herself but I sort of like to let myself think that she was fooled by my clever sales tactic. So it was decided; in the summer of 2008, we made arrangements to go.

Before arriving in Austin, I had decided that the price of the ticket would be justified if I could meet and make contact with some clever and cool people in the industry and feel inspired to pick up at least one skill that I did not have when I arrived. We set out from Burbank last Thursday, and embarked on one of the most irritating Southwest Airlines experiences of my life. The trip to Austin could be a post in itself so I will just wait to embellish on that here in the future or over a drink (you’re buying).

On my first day, I missed most of the sessions and wandered into a book reading that really didn’t hit home. At about 6:00 pm, I figured I should at least salvage the party part of the day and get a head start into the line for the Tap Room party. On arrival in the line I immediately made friends. The people there were excited to engage in conversations about things I rarely get to talk about in a party atmosphere. In most cases, you can hang with geeks or you can go out to a club and have some fun. SXSW is a rare place where the two merge and it was a lot of fun.

We drank and talked shop as well as a few almost religious debates about the cloud and Agile before we decided to leave and get some Pizza. That is where I ran into Andy Budd and Remy Sharp. These are indeed well known people to me though there was an silly moment where I asked Andy if he would be attending the Great British Booze up, not yet recognizing who he was. He responded with “I am the Great British Booze up” which I think was the best possible answer to be honest.

Later in the week, I attended a panel where ARIA was explained with detail and passion by Becky Gibson from IBM and Dojo. Before this I had not completely understood what ARIA was, though Becky really brought it to life. I did some more reading and realized that ARIA can be described as CSS for the visually impaired. This perspective on the subject of ARIA really made the subject interesting to me. You will continue to write semantic markup in the same way. ARIA is simply a layer that will be added to your markup, much like your CSS style-sheet. This is a simple way to enable everybody to use your site to its fullest. I am positive that I will bring this back to my team and challenge them to work this into our framework.

Over the next few days I attended some amazing interviews, panels, parties, and learned the right way to give a presentation. I also met Paul Boag, John Resig, and had an conversation with Daniel Burka about Agile. As our conversation progressed, he challenged a lot of career limitations that I did not even know that I had. Yes I am completely exhausted and eager to go home but it is with a year of inspiration and new friends that I go. See you next year SXSW!

Here is where the headaches begin: Microsoft has even gone as far as letting users opt in to compatibility mode during the install process of the IE8 browser. The choice is presented to the end user and is worded in such a way that the user would feel scared to not choose compatibility mode. Since this choice is presented as a simple radio option, there is no opportunity to restrict compatibility mode to a list of domains, like in the preferences. The compatibility mode will be used for all pages. This means that potentially most of those that go through the upgrade process from IE 6 or 7 to 8 will end up rendering in an IE7-like state, and unless your browser checks the user agent string for the mode, your hacks for IE7 will not exist. I am not proud to say that I have a few IE7 hacks though I have restricted them to IE7, so that any other browser will use a standards compliant default CSS set.

I have discovered one work-around. Microsoft does provide a meta tag that will instruct IE to always render in the latest standards mode. Using this should force your browser to behave. It would also be smart to ensure all hacks for IE6 and 7 are restricted to the intended version only with selector specific hacks or conditional comments. I do this by writing the user agent version as a class in the body tag and writing my selectors against that. Also remember to check your page using the IE8 developer tools, as they will show you if your site is rendering in the proper mode.

A member of our team came across an internal article from a developer who needed to solve the same problem and had an interesting proposal. This proposal suggested that these contributions could be solicited easier if there was a community established that works to spread the word about contributing and provides incentives for the user’s effort. The user would be rewarded with some sort of a paper certificate at a public ceremony. After giving this some thought, I think this article makes some good points about community management, but falls short in the incentive. Awards programs seem to always be the default incentive idea in proposals to motivate communities but with so many out there, so few chances to win, the (lets be honest) low value of the prize, and the time that would need to be put into selecting a winner. Not to mention that this takes peoples focus off of the passion for their craft and puts it on a pointless contest. I don’t think it is a good option. 

I think we should take the advice about community management and look at other successful community managers around us. One that comes to mind is Yelp. They were able to get real hipsters in real cities to write reviews for them; FOR FREE. These are quality reviews. Their success can be attributed to their Elite Member program. If you write enough highly rated reviews to where the community manager takes notice, you get to be part of an exclusive club. This club has a special mail list and events at posh lounges and restaurants. 

If I were to translate this model too our contribution cause, I would recommend that we start a program where a user could get the prestigious designation of a Framework contributer. They would have to have proven their skill by contributed one piece of code and shown an ability to support their code in the community. Call me optimistic but I think there are a lot of people that are passionate about what they do and we could use that passion as an incentive.

In the YUI 2X idiom of interface development, you would create a namespace for a section of your application. All of your instances, constructors, and various other junk would live in the scope of this namespace. My instance manager pattern would slightly change this in that constructed instances of widgets would be stored in a Instance Manager object. This object would be constructed as a member of any namespace that would be home to an instance of a widget. All of these instances would be kept in a sub-object of the Instance Manager which would be known as the “map” object.

The Instance Manager object would have 3 more methods:

• get
• set
• delete

“set” method
The “set” method that can be used to add an instance to the “map” object. Passing the constructor as an argument instead of passing an instance will delay the instantiation until the first time the instance id is called from the “get” method this is known as lazy loading.

“get” method
The “get” method that can be used to return an instance from the map object by passing its key as an argument.

“delete” method
The “delete” method will remove the instance from the map object by passing its key as an argument.

The point of this pattern is to create a consistent way to create and get instances of widgets. This is especially useful for use with the Unobtrusive JavaScript pattern because code written to look for special markup conventions on page load can be generalized

The highlight for me was a roundtable session where we suggested topics and allowed the group to have an open discussion. Some of this became a Q&A for our team and other parts were an open debate about best practice. I am happy to say that this entire roundtable session was captured on video and we will soon take note of every good idea shared in the room.

This feel this session may have done something that in all of the time I have been on this project, I am yet to see: it sparked a community. I hoped that after this event, we would all leave with a better understanding of who our team-mates are, and how we can work together to innovate. It turns out a lot of people want to innovate, I just think that they feel they are the minority. They let their urge to innovate give way to their need to just get the job done; since it seems the fight would be pointless otherwise. I hope out hour of open discussion was enough to tear down this misconception once and for all and let the ideas flow free.

We made a point to ask for feedback with some success. As we all know however, people are much more willing to share their true feelings when they are anonymous. I used SurveyMonkey.com to create a truly anonymous survey on a third party site. It turns out that we did get a lot more candid feedback but it was still all very gracious. I suppose we can count this first event as a success.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr by Shashank

Just as we so quickly moved from boom times to recession, we will turn this around. In the mean time there are some opportunities to seize. One that immediately comes to mind is the opportunity to build your network. One of the few upsides to the recent spike in layoffs, and there are not many, is that you and/or your former colleagues will be moving on to a new job. Make sure that you keep in touch with the people that you respect the most. Smart people will find other smart people and place themselves well. 

Last year, when I left my last employer of ten years, I kept a good number of connections. A lot of these people continue to be in my Twitter list, FriendFeed, Facebook, and RSS Reader. I attend user groups with them and meet on occasion for drinks. Some of them have moved to a couple of other companies in the past year. I have met some of their colleagues and learned a lot. It seems every time there is a layoff announcement, I have a few more friends and contacts that let me know that I have a place to go if a pink-slip finds its way to me.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2006 by dt10111

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