To the guy I use to work with who said when asked by a recruiter what he has been doing to keep up on his skills that there is nothing new to learn, I say there is so much we never touched on at our previous job. My current job has had me presenting at the last two team meetings the code I have been working on so that the rest of the team can rip it apart and show me where I need to improve. Luckily it isn't that bad but they have been showing me so many ways to make my code more robust with less lines of code. Now if they could only show me how to do it in less time. It seems like every time I sit down to write some code, I end up spending way too much time on it. This weekend I sat down to write a "quick change" to the PHP I wrote to get Steam game achievements and their images for use on the homepage and in the blink of an eye the weekend is over.
Sunday March 09, 2014
It's always good to surround yourself with smart people so that you get smarter but I have to say it is kind of intimidating when something a smart person can create in 5 minutes takes you two weeks and isn't as cool as what the smart guy came up with in 5 minutes like the recent challenge I was tasked with to create a sortable table. You would think with all the advances in HTML 5 that we would have a table that sorts itself but sadly that is still science fiction. To create a sortable table you have to use javascript and I have been using a 3rd party framework with my current project that is pretty cool but the challenge was to create one without using any frameworks. I did get something to sort but it doesn't unsort and if you throw a couple of numbers in there, they don't always sort right. At least my code wasn't super bad but I got some pointers to make it better that I have to remeber to use in future projects or when I refactor the current two projects I am working on.
