ronlg | web/ui developer

Glowing mouth!

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:42:00 -0500

Glowing mouth!

After working an all nighter at the office, I come home to my...

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:11:00 -0500

After working an all nighter at the office, I come home to my wife crying. Off to the dentist we go! She’s in the back right now getting this yanked out. Poor thing. It is also the 115th year anniversary of the X-ray. Tonight celebration will consist of a spoon fed chocolate banana shake and bloody gauze.

Tethering on Android

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:46:55 -0400

When at the office, I usually have my Clear 4G wireless dongle plugged into my Macbook Pro. I mostly do this so I don’t have to suck bandwidth from our internal network since I stream music throughout the day and geek out on sites like tumblr.

Today is different though; I forgot my dongle. So I resorted to using PDANet with my T-Mobile G2. Since T-Mobile has started using an HPSA+ network, I figured I would give it a shot. To my surprise, it works VERY well in my area.

Here are the results of my SpeedTest:

Not bad, right? Considering I’m in a concrete office building, I’d say that’s pretty good. I have been getting about the same from my 4G dongle, but the coverage area can be pretty spotty. At least with T-Mobile, they have coverage pretty much everywhere; I’m not sure about their HPSA+ coverage though. We’ll see how long it takes me to go through 5GB of bandwidth a month.

Lunch time.

Having fun with my step-daughter, Milla-pede.

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:08:09 -0400

Having fun with my step-daughter, Milla-pede.

A rare breed of rat-dog named Hubble.

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:05:30 -0400

A rare breed of rat-dog named Hubble.

Someone is tired! Oh the joys of being a dog. You can lay in the...

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:30:25 -0400

Someone is tired! Oh the joys of being a dog. You can lay in the middle of the floor with your legs open and it’s still considered, “normal behavior.” WOOF WOOF!

Less is More

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:38:00 -0400

I’m going to jump right in and start off with an example of what I mean by “less is more”.

   Hello World! Less is more!

Let’s take a look at those 5 lines of simple code. We have bold text wrapped in a paragraph tag. Here is how we can have less code do more things.

Hello World! Less is more!

You’re right, It isn’t bold anymore, but it will be with CSS. So in your CSS file, assuming that you have one being used, you want to do the following:

p#LessIsMore { font-weight: bold; }

Now all paragraph text with the ID of ‘LessIsMore’ will be bold. Calm down, I know that doesn’t look like anything too genius, but it does serve a great purpose. You now have the ability to only modify your stylesheet instead of touching every instance you want to be bold. With smaller websites, you might not find this to be an issue but when you’re working on sites that have hundreds of pages and countless lines of code that can be tweaked, you want to reduce the amount of time it takes to modify the simplest things.

Also, look at it from an SEO point of view. The less code that the search engine spiders have to sort through, the more visible the content on the site becomes. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Over the years, spiders have gotten smarter at doing this, but the easier you can make it, the better. Another thing a lot of people don’t realize is load time. Every single character of code you’re producing plays a role in the load time of the site. Not only that, but it costs money too - yes, bandwidth costs money. I won’t get into this, but keep it in your thoughts for the future.

Most end users don’t really understand or try to understand the importance of this and quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter if they do or not. It is our job as developers to provide the best User Experience as possible. Whether it be in the UI design, functionality or how quick the site loads.

There is an old saying of, “Work smart, not hard.” In fact, I just said that to someone about 5 minutes ago. If you can approach your work in a smarter way, the less work you will have to do in the long run; you hope.

Please keep in mind, there is always an exception to the rule.

"In all good time, great things shall happen…"

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:25:07 -0400

“In all good time, great things shall happen…”

- Ron LeonGuerrero

Coding HTML/CSS by hand?

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:14:00 -0400

When you’re trying to get that new job, contract or freelance gig, you have probably seen a requirement of having to know how to hand code HTML/CSS. Sure, many of you are wondering why this is a requirement. I have thought that many times in the past when applying for jobs. It wasn’t until the past 5 years that I began to really understand why.

Back in the earlier days of the dot-com, it really wasn’t a big deal to rely on applications like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. To be quite honest with you, it’s pretty standard to use software like Dreamweaver in current times. The whole issue with needing someone to be able to hand code HTML/CSS is not because the company is too cheap to purchase software (in some cases they are). Instead, it’s more about productivity, proficiency and skill level. Some people can pick it up pretty fast, others need to rely on software to help them build the bulk of code being produced.

If you’re working for an agency, you know that your chance of survival in that position won’t last very long if you aren’t able to be proficient. It is extremely important to have the proficiency or you will get eaten alive. When a client needs a change YESTERDAY, there isn’t time for you to figure out how to figure out how to take a HTML table and make it table-less. What if you ran into a scenario where you had to edit the file live on the server and you only had access to Notepad or something like vi?

In my opinion, knowing how to code by hand can only make you better and faster. This reminds me of a small conversation that came up in a meeting the other day. We were talking about knowledge transfer and how we can ensure that our team(s) are able to adhere to the same rules/practices. It led into me talking about how I learned Visual Studio (C# .NET) by using the UI to implement controls and other elements. As I gained more experience with using Visual Studio, I realized the advantage of using code behind and other methods. Everyone has their level of knowledge and it will only get better with exposure, opportunity and patience.

How do you feel about all of this? I am sure there are plenty of you out there that wonder WHY it’d be a requirement to know how to code by hand.

To put it simple and to the point, “Why not?”.