McArthur GFX

Some people can get super excited about their projects, and others can’t wait till it’s done. That attitude, that enthusiasm, bleeds into everyone else on the project. Some people might try to argue that everyone controls their own attitude, and to a degree, they’d be right. But this isn’t about whether individuals can overcome a dominant attitude. That’s not the issue at stake. The issue is that by being glum or not-caring about your project will affect others working on it, and why would you bet on them being able to overcome your apathy?

Your enthusiasm (or lack thereof) will rub off onto your workers, and even onto your customers.

A few people in the web world have started an argument about whether websites need to invest in SEO. I understand why website owners would be confused about the topic, but it should be pretty straightforward for web designers. This article was a long time coming, they just provoked me to sit down long enough to fill up a page of my opinion. Actually, I think these people are trying to say what I’ll be saying: make a good website, and the rest will come.

In game development, it's very common to want a random number. Maybe you want to determine damage done, if there was a critical, or what slot on the board to insert your piece at. And surprisingly (or perhaps, not), programmers are often looking to make this random number a little less... random.

Something a Java programmer learns first is that there is this big, amazing library already built-in to Java, and you can easily use plenty of useful classes by using an import statement. Possibly the first thing you want to do is pop open a box to prompt your name, or say hello, and thus starts this terrible habit:

import javax.swing.*;

Recently, there has been a bit of talk about upcoming tablets like the CrunchPad and the iSlate, and whether we need them, how useful they'll be, or ifthey're only use is browsing the web on the toilet. Many people are of the opinion that we don't need one. Or that only gadget enthusiasts would buy it for couch web browsing. Well, I'll go out and say it: Tablets will replace everything.

Web development has become increasingly popular.  Does that make it easy? Does that make us dumb?

Certainly, as Michael Braude says, the barrier to web development is incredibly low. HTML can be learned in a couple hours.  A couple more and you can make something "just work" in Javascript. As a web programmer, I never have to worry about 3D rendering, rarely do I ever have to care about threading, writing to disk is taken care of for me by SQL.  The problems we're trying to solve usually aren't so astronomical to need an ingenious algorithm designed.

I've seen several big name web-sites point out this argument about whether or not CSS is worse for making web-sites than tables were, and I'm honestly getting sick of it .  Some (self-proclaimed?) bigwigs in the web industry are even saying it's easier to use tables and that's what they're going to use for now.  I assume everyone knows the reasons for using standards, semantic html, cascading stylesheets, and the like instead of tables.  The benefits are enormous.  But is it really too hard?