I’ve spent the last few months scouring the web for stunning web designs. Searching high and low for web designs that really jump out at me and I’ve discovered two things.
When viewing a post about high quality web designs, you are presented with a bunch of thumbnails. It’s amazing how good a bad website looks when it’s compressed to the dimensions of a postage stamp. I find myself consistently disappointed when I see the full view of these websites. There’s always some detail that is just completely overlooked that throws the balance of the site off. Whether a strange font choice or poorly compressed images, it’s rare to find gold.
I understand that sometimes a client request can get in the way of that completely perfect design, but many of these sites belong to web designers themselves which is the scary part.
The second is a little closer to home. I’m very interested in the standard of work coming from Perth. For the most part, I really don’t like what I see. We are in an industry that is made up of people of all ages, and varying levels of professionalism. Print designers turned web designers, university students, boutique web studios, we have it all. A quick view through the top 10 results at Google for Perth Web Design will present you with this variety, and you have to look quite hard to find really stunning designs. Even a low budget website can still be designed well. Cheap doesn’t have to mean nasty.
Also there’s some very well known large web companies that seem to have really dropped the ball lately. I guess once you reach a certain size, the web design is no longer the primary focus. I hope we are never responsible for polluting the web with substandard websites. And if we do, I hope someone will bring it to our attention.
Perth web designers, this is a call. Come out of the woodwork and share your stunning designs to put my mind at ease.
Smashing Magazine recently published a great article on choosing a domain name for your site, product or company. It’s a problem that many of our customers face, so if you’re in the market for a new domain, or are interested in how your domain stacks up against their recommendations, be sure to check it out.
Programming isn’t a science, it’s more of a craft to me. A craft implies a combination of some creativity and some practicality. You can make a wardrobe that does the job, or you can get a craftsman to do the job and you’ll end up with something that is not only functional, but great to look at. Craftsmen build the furniture you buy from antique stores.
Software can certainly be the same. Software can work, or it can work well. It can be inspiring and fun to work on, or it can be terrible and boring. It generally comes down to the skill and work ethic of the person that is writing it in the first place. I want to build an antique, not an $11 chair from Ikea.
Corey Haines has been doing a series of videos about all matters software related, but he seems to be mainly passionate about Pair Programming. I like how he sometimes delves into the psychology of people in an industry that is populated by so many with unusual profiles.
He operates a blog called On Being a Journeyman Software Craftsman and it contains a bunch of videos and short blurbs about things he’s learned while on his trip. I’d check it out and you might learn a bit about some of the cooler ideas out there in the software world.
I’ve written about Rails Rumble previously, the 48 hour event where teams turn an idea into a web application using Ruby on Rails. I was surprised to see the completeness of some of the applications that were developed this year as well as the utility of the ideas they implemented.
One of the more interesting articles I’ve seen in relation to Rails Rumble analysed the prevalence of various plug-ins and gems that teams utilised.
After a quick look there are a few points that specifically interest me :
jQuery is the most used Javascript library, even though it isn’t the default included with Rails. I think this says a lot about where jQuery fits in the client side coding space these days. Under further scrutiny it seems clear that jQuery had an even larger base of use than shown in that graph, as explained here.
1 in 3 teams used a skeleton application. All of those teams used Bort. That’s a pretty overwhelming statistic for two reasons. Firstly it means you should be looking at using skeleton applications if you aren’t already. Secondly anything that you develop that could be used in other applications should possibly be a gem or plug-in. Reuse doesn’t seem to be something you just talk about anymore.
Over 50% of people wrote tests as part of their application, and the majority of people used a Behaviour Driven Development framework such as Shoulda or rSpec (they got rSpec!). Keep in mind that even on a tight schedule most people using Rails are writing tests!
Over a third of applications offered OpenID support for authentication. Given I don’t even remember where I signed up for OpenID this surprises me. Maybe it’s time to join this bandwagon?
I think the article gives a good indicator where you should look to implement certain parts of your application. Generally speaking, if a lot of passionate developers are using a particular library or piece of code then you’d be wise to make the same choice.
It’s taken almost five years, but the final verdict is in and SCO owes Novell $2.5M for the pain and suffering it caused with its claims that the Linux kernel was tainted with source code that it owned.
To be honest, I’d forgotten all about this, but I guess it’s a good thing that it’s all wrapped up. Poor SCO, that buy-out offer from IBM never came, did it?