Zak's Sidewalk

A big project

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 07:17:00 +0000

Last year I started a new project that I thought I'd launch 4 months ago. I underestimated the project requirements. And the process of figuring out what I needed to do, I made a lot of mistakes.

But I learned a lot too. I've learned so much.

And it's experiences like this, great growth from painful mistakes, that make me nervous — is this the kind of path I need to take to grow and develop? I'd really prefer to grow from many modest successes, but it never really works out that way.

I'm totally counting chicken before they've hatched here too. I haven't finished this project. There's many little things left to do, which reminds me of the advice that when you're 95% done, you're only halfway done. But I can see a light at the end of this tunnel and mixed in with the shame of missed deadlines is a lot of pride in what we've built together.

The Cyclotron

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 20:17:00 +0000

Toured the Cylotron at Texas A&M this weekend. So impressive how foundational low-tech tools are for high-tech applications. In this case, old peripherals and diagnostic tools for studying radiation exposure on electronic components.

And a real treat for me, after spending my whole day in front of web interfaces and deeply derivative skeumorphics, to see analog and gen 1.0-style dials, switches, guages, peripherals.

Some of my favorites:

How to roadtrip

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 07:33:00 +0000

Lauren and I have a foolproof method for roadtripping and staying fresh. We switch off every hour. Even if the driver feels alert, we find it's safer and more enjoyable to keep switching off.

It goes something like this. I always drive first while Lauren keeps me company. We'll talk about our business and big plans on the horizon. An hour flies by in what seems like only a few minutes and we'll pull over at a Starbucks for Lauren's first shift.

I usually get a treat for myself too. Then we're back on the road. Within minutes I'm asleep. No matter how much coffee was in that little treat, it's the sleep of the dead for me. I start to drool. I get the drool everywhere, on my shirt, in the seat stitching, the door handle; it gets in the cd player. I basically drool through the entire hour. Lauren's probably playing a podcast and will usually run over the hour to catch the end of it. And besides, I look so peaceful there in my slobber. Finally, though, it's time for a switch.

A quick swap on an exit ramp and I'm back in the driver's seat. Lauren starts to tilt her seat back, but not so fast. I've got some big ideas and somebody needs to hear them. This is a great opportunity for Lauren to hear how my opinions have evolved on transportation infrastructure, the size of the military, how the wealth gap is manifesting itself in various sports, and my predictions for upcoming elections.

All that talking typically wears me out in about 30 minutes so we pull over for a nap. If we're in a time crunch, Lauren'll pull one for the team and start her shift early. This part is a blur for me because I usually curl up in the back seat with a fleece blanket and travel pillow. I tend to wake up about half an hour from our destination. Just enough time for me to take care of the tricky bit.

No matter where we're headed, it typically never feels like more than a couple hours and I always arrive refreshed.

If roads were code

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 04:52:00 +0000

I work in code all day and so I make mistakes all day. But I also fix mistakes all day. And this makes me think why doesn't everyone else also fix mistakes all day, specifically why don't we fix mistakes with roads. I mean, seriously, wouldn't that be wonderful? So many roads are poorly designed, or they were reasonably designed, but are now out of date.

Can't you imagine if we could just take an old road, save it as south-lamar_archive.road, move it to our archived roads folder and then quickly design up a new one. What would be possible? We could rapidly prototype new (or new to a region) ideas: super-wide highways, traffic circles, Michigan Lefts, multi-level, toll and HOV, peak demand flow.

We could burn through all kinds of civic trends and start getting a real understanding of what patterns work in different regions, and then refine them. And, of course, change it all as the region changes, as it grows in size and density, as technology changes, as patterns change.

Imagine if we had road building materials that we could lay out, drive-ready, at 10 miles a day. Imagine if you could re-do entire highway as it passes through a town over a weekend. You could try out all kinds of designs. You could start addressing needs and goals beyond throughput.

Instead of building to some grim calculus of cars-per-hour-per-lives-lost, you could engineer roads that made everyone safer, that actually promoted safety. Roads that reduced conflict, connected communities, re-opened regions to wildlife migration. You could have modular sections built off-site and then assembled. Roads could have integrated signs with digital paper; and cable car / moving walkway for cars style hookups that would turn existing cars into driverless; and built in lighting so we can drive without headlights; and rapid draining; and sound dampening. Roads could be built with clearance so people and animals can easily cross under the street; and to protect pedestrians (even if they're not paying attention) as a default; and to allow easy access to utilities without shutting down lanes.

I'd love if we could approach transportation infrastructure with hope and curiosity. And if every time we got it wrong, or not right enough, we could etch-a-sketch it and try again.

A coding isogloss

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 09:38:00 +0000

Every site I build uses html, css, and javascript; liquid too if I'm building an ecommerce shop. It's easy to forget that each of these is a language rather than a library of tools, and that proficiency can be thought of as fluency.

When I look at a design in photoshop, I immediately translate what I'm seeing into its component languages — the structure and content into html, the style into css, the interaction into javascript and the data into liquid. It's like seeing an object and imagining how it's said in English and Spanish and Russian. And why; how did each of these cultures build this word? What does it mean to them?

Sometimes I lament that a particular coding language can't perform a function that is routine in another, and it makes me think of words that don't translate from one spoken language to another. Like how the King James Bible both "agape" and "phileo" are translated as "love."

Moving between these languages ultimately becomes fluid. I write the content and structure code of the site while including classes that I intend to use for style and functionality, or write a data loop that contains displayed content. But as much as these languages work together to present a unified picture and experience, they're still separated within the code. The style code has its own files. Javascript too has its own files or is relegated to the bottom of the document.

And so the file organization ultimately draws a map of languages — here style is spoken, here is spoken the language functionality, and here you will read content with style and functionality accents.

Miss you little Chickie

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 15:57:00 +0000

Riding in Texas in Spring

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 07:29:00 +0000

In Mexico, they call the Texas bluebonnet el conjeo, the rabbit, for it's white tip like the cotton tail rabbit. And it's fitting, that a wild texas rabbit announces the Texas spring.

Road Trip Soundtrack

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 07:19:00 +0000

Soundtrack for our road trip tomorrow down to Bandera:

Stay Too Long — Plan B
Dreams — Youngblood Hawke
Shut Up and Dance — Walk The Moon
America's Son — Air Review
Got Love — Hedley
Oh, What A Life — American Authors
Brave — Sara Bareilles
And Run — He Is We
Pioneers — The Lighthouse and The Whaler
Devil — Lydia
Bowsprit — Balmorhea
When You Were Young — Ella Mae Bowen
The Boxer — Mumford & Sons
Go Your Own Way — Lissie

For Chasmaporthetes ossifragus, they sent a poet

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Sun, 12 Oct 2014 23:33:00 +0000

Chasmaporthetes is a genus of Hyena, extinct for the better part of the last million years. It's known as the American hyena, a dog-like hyena, and is the only hyena to have made it to North America, having crossed the land bridge over the Bering Strait.

Chasmaporthetes was discovered at the turn of the 20th century by a Kansas paleontologist and celebrity fossil hunter named Barnum Brown (named after the circus showman). But the hyena was properly identified and named 20 years later by Oliver Perry Hay. Hay was a curator of the United States National Museum, which eventually became the Smithsonian.

O.P. Hay gave the American Hyena the scientific name Chasmaporthetes ossifragus. Ossifragus means "bone breaking," which describes something the animal does, namely its bite. But he gave it the peculiar genus of Chasmaporthetes, which means "he who saw the canyon" referring to the Grand Canyon, as Barnum Brown discovered the hyena's bones in an Arizona copper mine.

Arguably Hay named the animal in reference to the location where it was found. This is the only of the Hyaenidae genera to migrate to North America, though subsequent species have been found across the globe from Spain to Tibet.

I like to imagine, though, that Hay saw in these old bones on his desk a fellow American, an explorer, a feisty dog who got to see the Colorado cut through billions of years of the earth. Perhaps Hays, from just the lower jaw collected by Brown, could trace the form of a running dog, the way our ancestors traced constellations, and imagined his story. Perhaps Hays could imagine this dog on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and see through his eyes a younger and rougher, but still staggeringly deep canyon.

From Wired

Why we bought the new iPhone 6 [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 18:04:00 +0000

Lauren and I wanted to upgrade our phones. We didn't need new phones, but it's good for us to use the actual devices our clients use and what our client's customers use.

For testing, I spend a lot of time on my crossbrowsertesting account and in the google chrome emulator. But less so every day. There's nothing like testing with the real thing. iOS and Android render, function, and interact differently than emulated or framed iOS and Android. But more importantly, we need to be designing and building with the user experience on that device in mind, rather than just troubleshooting after it's already designed and built.

So we went to the store and looked at the array of new phones. The Samsung and LG were awesome phones and we seriously considered getting them instead of the new iPhones. But we decided to think it over.

We got home from the store and, mostly out of curiosity, looked up our clients' site analytics. We wanted to know what their customers were using. We'd read statistics that said Android has 80% of global smartphone market share and something like 60% in the US. It made sense, then, to go with Android to use what our clients and their customers were using.

But the analytics told an entirely different story.

We were seeing that Android users made up less than 5% of our client's customers traffic. And iOS users made up nearly 90% of traffic. We looked at site after site and found the same results across markets and ecommerce and information sites.

Here's an artist's ecommerce device statistics:

Barely over 2% from Android and over 89% from iOS. Makes me wonder why I bother testing for the Android devices.

We found the same results across all our client's ecommerce sites:

Here is another artist and two shops selling homegoods:

Of course, many of our ecommerce clients have design-focused boutique shops, so lopsided figures favoring Apple was to be expected, but we found the same results across industries. Here's a health care information site:

And here's two information sites for local service providers:

I figured there would be a clear winner; I just didn't expect it to be so extremely lopsided.

Little feller in the bike lane

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:03:00 +0000

At the last second I saw this little green snake sunning himself in a country bike lane.

From Today's Ride

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:49:00 +0000

Time to work Zak! [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 05:46:00 +0000

After graduating I worked as a cook and teacher at a very small boarding school on Martha's Vineyard. At it's peak, I think there were something like 20-30 students, but while I worked there, there were no more than 10. I cooked lunch and dinner 7 days a week and taught one literature class to two Japanese students who were preparing to enter New England prep schools in the fall. It was a prep school prep school. I earned $300 every two weeks plus room and board plus I got to see Martha's Vineyard. It was a great job.

The school was a very large house in the town of Oak Bluff. The owners, students, one other teacher and I lived in the house. A third, the supervising (and brilliant) English teacher, live elsewhere on the island. All the students and the other teacher lived upstairs. My room, large enough for a bed and small desk, was downstairs a little off from the kitchen. I wasn't really hired to teach — I was hired to cook, and clean up around the house.

I told you all that so I could tell you this.

One late afternoon, after classes and a trip to the beach, I was in my room reading with the door open. Hidehisa, one of the students from Japan who would be starting his freshman year in a month, appeared in my door. He held a plunger in his hand and told me "Time to work Zak!"

Looking at this page of code in front of me I'm reminded of that day.

Social Sharing

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:14:00 +0000

For the longest time I've been using http://www.sharethis.com/ to include sharing links on clients' sites. But I don't like all the server calls for just a few sharing links, and I really don't like having to deconstruct the default sharethis functionality to get branding-free tweets/posts/pins.

So now I'm trying just writing my own sharing links. Integrating with Shopify makes it even easier because I can easily re-use code by using liquid product variables.

SPCA

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 06:33:00 +0000

Heidi: Hello SPCA, my people are feeding me dental treats.

SPCA: We encourage pet owners to feed their dogs healthy treats.

Heidi: What?!

Line Item Properties Fix [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 18:41:00 +0000

Shopify's line item properties are an awesome feature that have exploded the possibilities for product customization in Shopify stores.

However, I've recently noticed that there's a small issue with how some of that information can be displayed in the shop owner's admin. The line breaks are displayed properly in the cart, email notifications, and customer-facing order page. But in the Shopify admin the line breaks are removed.

So, the customer would enter this:

Happy Valentine's Day!
Love,
Zak

But the shop owner sees:

Happy Valentine's Day! Love, Zak

This doesn't happen with cart attributes, though, so I've come up with a workaround to preserve those line breaks by assigning line item properties to unique cart attributes:

When you cycle through the line item properties to display them on the cart page, you also add them to a hidden cart attribute input element (in this case a textarea element). When the customer checks out, the values are displayed on the Admin Orders page as both line item properties and also cart notes.

Hardage & Hardage & Hatfield

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 03:09:00 +0000

I've just brought on another developer, Luke Hatfield, to help with some of my projects. My thinking was that we'd start small, I'd teach him my processes, and then we'd take bigger bites.

The project I chose to start with turned out totally different than I expected. The client asked for some pretty difficult customizations to his Shopify store. So I worked up a proof of concept (more for me), and then asked Luke to integrate that code into a development site for the client.

Luke found a few false assumptions in my code, and we spent the better part of a day chasing them down. That is until Luke re-imagined the entire thing. Our solution is now simpler, more accurate, more intuitive for the client and their customers, and makes any future updates that much easier.

I was looking for someone to help me code more; I didn't realize he would also help me code better.

Tradition and Technology

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:21:00 +0000

Cycling and baseball are my two favorite sports. I love how both are fundamentally simple, but also offer rich complexity and nuance. Both have long, storied histories with tradition, culture, and etiquette. But cycling also has a technological component. In fact, tradition and technology are two of the strongest drivers in road cycling.

I love and hate the core technological component of cycling. The new developments are exciting and create constant opportunities, but they also create obligations to keep up, not only with your training, but also your equipment. It can be a real financial burden. And cyclosport is by no means immune to some of the more obnoxious practices of other manufacturing industries: planned obsolescence, arbitrary model years, incompatible and propriety components, etc.

So I'm not sure what to think about electronic shifting, integrated seat posts, and road disc brakes. Of course, I should probably spend less time reading sport/industry blogs and more time spinning pedals because, at the end of the day, it really isn't about the bike.

Resizing Images [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 08:22:00 +0000

In most cases, CSS is the best tool for handling varying product image sizes. But occasionally a project demands that you crop and/or resize images based on their orientation.

I wanted to share my solution for conditional resizing in Shopify using javascript.

Blue Jay

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:23:00 +0000

This little blue jay chick can't fly yet and couldn't get back up into the nest so he's just tucked up into his wing for the night on our back porch.

Image taken with an iPad and a flashlight.

Random Product Order in Shopify [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:05:00 +0000

Pretty stoked about this (relatively) simple solution to displaying products in random order on the Collection page in Shopify. Hat tip to the Stack Overflow community for pointing me to the Fisher Yates shuffle.

Notes:

When adding html to your products array, don't use liquid-generated image tags — they'll automatically use double quotes and break your javascript.

Shopify forloops start with n=1. So you need to either begin your javascript loops with n=1 or create an n=0 array with your liquid for loop. I chose the latter by writing collection[0]="{{ collection.products.first.title }}"; before initiating the liquid forloop.

Blog Archives for Shopify [a coding post]

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:42:00 +0000

Shopify does not support blog archiving, which is kind of a bummer for clients who are so used to seeing this pretty standard feature on most other blogs they visit.

So I've coded a little workaround using article tags. The client simply needs to enter a tag for each post in this format:YYYY Month. Then, we filter so we can keep using tags as the client expects to use tags. Shopify automatically orders the tags alphanumerically so all we need to do is reverse the order to display most recent date tags first.

Add as many year loops as you think the site could be in operation -- I only show 3 here to keep it simple. Not perfect — a little hard coded, but it's pretty easy for the client and intuitive for the visitor.

Sneak Preveiw: Style by Color (a coding post)

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:06:00 +0000

This is a sneak preview of a cool Wordpress blog feature I'm working on with Sara Cormier. It's pretty easy for the client to use. The colors are generated by post tags. She simply types a color into the tags field and it's used as the background color of a css shape. Simple to code, simple to use!

Riding like Stacy

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:40:00 +0000

I pedaled straight off the road today. I was riding the beautiful and winding Lime Creek Road when I got distracted and kept going straight as the road turned left. I was able to keep the bike upright thanks to my unfailing calm under pressure (unless, of course, you're counting the pressure of not riding off the road).

Zone 2

noreply@blogger.com (bloggerz) — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:08:00 +0000

Zone 2 is a comfortable pace, a heart rate range that you can maintain all day. When you meet a buddy for an easy ride, it's common to announce "I'm just doing zone 2 today." It takes the pressure off the ride by agreeing to take it easy and not race. Of course it's total bullshit. Everyone always pushes it. You want your buddy to think "This is his zone 2?!"

I told you that so I could tell you this story. Tonight was my first race back this season, the 3/4 crit at the Driveway. I showed up early, pinned on my smooth new number and got in a few minutes on the rollers before heading over to stage for the start.

On the way I met up with a good friend and we threw out the racing equivalent of the zone 2 proclamation, "I'm just looking for a pack finish today." I'd told my wife the same thing before I left, and I totally believed it. Of course, as soon as I got warmed up and felt those pre-race nerves, I started thinking that a top-half finish wouldn't be altogether unreasonable. Before the start, Andrew, the race promoter listed out the primes. There were 5, 4 decent little goodies like gift certificates and coffee, and 1 complete dud, a Miller Light yoga mat. I started thinking no one would want that crummy old yoga mat -- I just might be able to pull off a prime tonight.

I couldn't have been more unrealistically optimistic. All 5 primes were called in the first half of the race and I couldn't see who won them for my intense focus on the wheel immediately in front of me. And even though I struggled just to stay in the pack, averaging zone 5b the entire time, two brief moments re-sparked that hopeless optimism.

With 3 laps to go, I found myself in a breakaway. I'd been following a guy's wheel when a couple riders took off along the right for the break. My draft, already accelerating past the pack, punched it a little to catch up. Two more joined us for a decent break. The break failed, due in some small part to my inability to do any work. But the very fact that I found myself in a break at all got me thinking that I just might place well tonight.

Then, on the last lap, I followed the right wheels and took the final corner confidently enough to land me in around 5th wheel with about 500m to go. At this point, the mayor of Whoville that lives inside of me was absolutely convinced that I would podium. A big, kit-stretching rider passed me on the right. I hopped on his wheel and we began passing the lead riders. This is happening. This is really happening. We approached 200m and I stood up out of the saddle as nearly 20 riders swarmed past me. I finished 19th.