One of my favorite things about transitioning from my previous profession into the world of web design and development is how open, welcoming and helpful the web community is.
Today, I wanted to take just a minute to thank a few folks who, whether they realize it or not, helped me get to where I am today.
Three months ago, I released Kraken (yea, that just happened), a modular, open source boilerplate for front-end web developers.
It’s been exciting to see Kraken used as the starting point for other people’s projects. It’s been forked into a Ruby gem, with a Sass fork in the works as well.
But managing an open source project has also helped me write better code.
About a month ago, Brad Frost and Ethan Marcotte both tweeted a link to my article about content parity on the web.
Ethan literally wrote the book on RWD, and Brad Frost does more than anyone else I know to push the web design and development profession forward. They’re both kind of a big deal, and as a result the article gained a lot of traction.
A weird thing happened, though. Based on the tweets I read, for a lot of folks the takeaway of that article was, “Less is more when it comes to mobile.” And that’s not the point I was trying to make at all.
If you’ve ever attached an event handler to the window’s resize event, you have probably noticed that while Firefox fires the event slow and sensibly, IE and Webkit go totally spastic.
When I built JetPack last year, I used WordPress to handle the user and content management so I could focus on building a great experience. Right now, I’m working on another app – a scavenger hunt for new hires – and I’m using WordPress again.
Rocky Point was the place to go when I was a kid. Created by Captain William Winslow in the 1840s on the coast of Rhode Island, Rocky Point eventually grew into a thriving amusement park and food hall.
I can remember taking boat rides there as a kid just for the chowder and clam cakes.
You Must Be This Tall, by director David Bettencourt, is the award-winning story of Rocky Point as told by the people who were there. Something I learned: the first phone call by a president was made from Rocky Point by Rutherford Hayes.
Sadly, Rocky Point closed its doors in 1995 after years of financial mismanagement by its shareholders (source: Wikpedia). The rides were auctioned off, some of them finding homes in other parks, and the park fell into disrepair.
The land was originally planned to be turned into condos, but I just learned that it has instead been turned back into a state park. Sadly, the decaying park still stands, fenced off from the public.