Anyone following me on Twitter or Gchat (waves to la_directora, nex0s, and fei_hong) know that I've been doing rather painful, deadline-driven work. Actually, it's the kind of work I did for the first 10 years of my career in web development/multimedia development/Internets-smartypantsness. It's fun, challenging work: coding, interpreting a design that either I or another graphic designer created, refined, and got approved by the client. I just happen to not have had to do nearly as much of it since I went to work for El Hugamundo Gigantico Company as a team lead. Mostly what I do now is go to meetings, make lists, check things off lists, try to predict when things will get done, explain why things did not get done when I predicted they would get done, write memos, send emails, and tell team members and vendors to do stuff.

I love working with vendors. It's like being the recipient of excellent customer service but without having to fork over my own cash.

I love telling other people what to do. I'm sure you're really surprised to hear this. In the past two years however, I've also discovered that managing involves more than just telling people what to do. Employees, especially highly skilled programmers, often won't just do what you tell them to do. They want to know why. And you'd better have a damn good answer or they'll find a way to not do it.

The good thing about getting back to this kind of work is that it shows me point-blank how fucking difficult it is to code. Coding is a creative act. Anyone who has actually coded, scripted, or programmed knows this. The other so-called "creatives," who draw pictures and write words, like to laugh when a programmer busts out with that claim (I can think of one particular retreat with the publications department of a large travel company), but that's just because they're threatened by the idea that they might be irrelevant. As a former English major, I know all about that fear. And not only is coding a creative act, but it's being creative in a language that changes a hell of a lot faster than English, or French, or Chinese.

These last two weeks have also really impressed on me the awesomeness of my team when it comes to actually making deadlines. I wish I could say the same. Of course they hem and haw and hedge their bets, but I also let them know I'm going to pad the timelines a bit in my project plan. Because shit goes wrong. And trying to predict how long it will take to develop a particular application is a bit like trying to predict how much money I'll need to invest if I want to retire at age 65 (hahahahaha) without having to eat beans and rice for the rest of my life. IT is fundamentally chaotic, and the more complex the systems, the more chaotic it becomes. And we live in a world with very, very complex systems. Cf. teh intarwebs.

The good news is that the company I currently work for understands that stuff happens and deadlines need to be extended. I've been working flat-out to try to get something ready for release this Friday. But as the week wore away and the time allotted for actual QA got smaller and smaller (now you understand why so many Microsoft upgrades have more bugs than an organic strawberry patch), I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Just this afternoon, I learned that the event that required the deadline has been pushed back a couple weeks. Which means that my deadline suddenly went from OMG MUST MAKE IT CANNOT PUSH IT BACK NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN to well, maybe ok, another week or so. Also, the business owner initially did not want to spend any more money on outside vendors, which is why I ended up coding the whole thing myself. But when push came to shove, they were willing to consult with the @w3$ome design-build firm that helped us with wireframes and visual designs on some thorny CSS-related issues.

Which means that stressed-out Okelle who thought she was going to have to miss Army Guy's birthday dinner tonight is suddenly happy Okelle who has enough time to finish her work. And everybody likes a happy Okelle.

A web developer actually puts the two methodologies to the test.

Page One:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/tables-vs-css
Page Two:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/tables-vs-css/2

First, a new CSS tweak I learned today about the background declaration:

In CSS shorthand, you can do all sorts of neat things with your div, including setting a background color and image for individual divs within a page. Ev0l implementation of the background declaration will result in ugly myspace pages and other crimes again nature. But you can also use it to do some pretty neat stuff, including image swapouts without lines and lines and lines of Javascript mouseover code, as in Zeldman's top-level navigation menu. Instead of adding a bunch of code that looks something like this:

<a href="thepage.html" onmouseover="img.[imgname].src='longassURLhere/img_onstate.gif'" onmouseout="img.[imgname].src='longassURLhere/img_offstate.gif'"><img src="longassURLhere/img_offstate.gif" name="imgname" border="0"></a>

You set the mouseover attributes in the stylesheet and end up with code that looks like this on the page:

<li id="dailymenu"><a href="/" title="Web design news and insights since 1995.">daily report</a></li>

That's what they mean by semantic code -- it actually has something to do with the structure of the page.

I also just learned that you can further tweak the position of the background image within the div itself.

This is the shorthand version of the background declaration:
.theClass {
background: #F0F0E8 url('/imgs/arrow_right.gif') 10px 12px no-repeat;
}

translation:
1. The background color, in a hex value.
2. The URL location of a background image (make sure you enter the right URL, or it won't show up at all and you'll be tearing your hair out wondering why it's not showing).
3. Then, the top and left pixel offset location of that bacground image! I'd seen this declared before as "top left", but didn't know that you could, in fact, get even more specific about positioning within the div.
4. If you don't specify no-repeat, it will do the old wallpaper-tile effect. And nobody wants that.

Second, a nice article about the history of the Unix and Linux operating systems, for those of you who haven't yet read about the wonderful good old days of computing, back when sendmail code ran free around the Arpanet and long-haired, bearded compsci majors at Berkeley dreamed of feeding the starving masses in Croatia.

http://www.informationweek.com/research/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191901844&pgno=4&queryText=

Because technogoddesss did it.


Which Programming Language are You?

I'm glad I didn't come out as Javascript, because I'm about ready to throw it out the window right about now. My kingdom for a true data-driven architecture! Or some php code!

I'm not sure how I feel about this, in spite of the fact that I use it and find it a fairly decent platform:


Which OS are You?

Mention of this version-control software has popped up a couple of times in the past week, so I thought I'd post about it here. I've used SourceSafe in the Microsoft ASP enviroment, but wasn't aware that there was an Open Source equivalent. Silly me. If haX0rs can make OpenOffice, of course they'd make version control software:

"The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license."

More info and download here:
http://subversion.tigris.org/

Anyone used it? How would you compare it to VSS?

We used to call them "false friends" in French class. You know, those words that seem like they should mean the same thing as they do in English. "Actuellment," for instance, does not mean "actually." It means "nowadays."

Well, CSS has false friends, too. For instance, "height" inside a <TR> tag works. But its CSS equivalent is "line-height".

Here's a new acronym for you: FOUC. It stands for "Flash of Unstyled Content," and it's used to describe a fairly common phemonenon in the latest generation of websites that solely use CSS for their layouts.

In the bad old days of the web, we used to use tables to force elements to show up on the page particular ways. And lots of developers still do. But there's a growing sector of folks who are tossing the old table model (tables were never intended to be used as a layout tool) and making the leap to 100% CSS positioning. I myself finally saw the wisdom of the new model about two years ago and have been steadily moving toward 100% standards-compliant coding on projects for my client RCG (main website here: http://www.rcg-llc.com). The validation tool over at the W3C site is very nitpicky. My latest projects passes:

http://www.557-559.com

The FOUC happens when the stylesheet takes slightly longer to load than the actual content of the page; but there's more to it than that, since it doesn't happen for all sites.

Here's the skinny:

It happens you use the " @import" function in your <HEAD> tag without also including a LINK HREF to a stylesheet or a <script> reference as well.

You can fix it by adding a LINK HREF or SCRIPT reference to your HEAD tag, even if the SCRIPT reference is empty.

A nicely worded explanation lives on the BlueRobot site.