recent posts

I’ve been using only Apple products for a couple of years now, and for the most part it’s been a pretty rewarding experience. That said, I know exactly what my least favorite part of the Mac experience is: its light-text-on-a-dark-background rendering in the web browser is gross.

How can there be so much attention to detail everywhere, but when I decide to invert my world with a dark-themed website I get blotchy, leaky type? Blech. Through many hours of experimenting and a happy accident while coding on the train, I stumbled across a solution. More »

It was only a matter of time, but I’ve created a second TextMate theme, “Clouds Midnight,” a dark-background version my popular first theme, Clouds.

Download Clouds Midnight now.

Like Clouds, this theme was built to work nicely with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. As always, please provide feedback if you use it with another language. More »

Sometimes creativity can manifest itself in weird ways. I’ve created a new TextMate theme called “Clouds.” It’s a light theme — as you may have guessed — that starts with a white background and grows from there.

Download Clouds now.

It was build to work nicely with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. If you code in other languages, your feedback is encouraged. I’d love to know how to widen the scope of this theme. More »

Encapsulation is a concept used in object-oriented programming that allows code to scale and be refactored without taking down the entire system. In coding, encapsulation states that my code can call a function (giving it the required parameters) and it will get the same result back every time exactly as expected without needing to know what went on inside the function itself.

When translated to project management, encapsulation can increase productivity, ingenuity, quality, trust and morale. It establishes a connection between responsibility and authority — a key component of project management. More »

Today I took the time to streamline the new SureDev site and actually investigated what each aspect of the YSlow Firebug extension was complaining about. Since the solutions to each were relatively easy to implement but a bit scattered to find around the web, here’s a full list of the things I did in my .htaccess to go from a D-grade to an A.

Oh, this post assumes you’re using Apache, which is what I use. If anyone has advice on other webservers, please leave comments about it. More »

*Beta, of course. :)

Version 2 of the site has been posted live for the world to see, and although there are still a bunch of tweaks that need to be made, things seem stable enough to release. IE users, I can’t promise you anything yet, but I’m working on it. More »

There’s been a growing trend lately amongst people that have more than one Twitter account: unwanted retweeting. Here’s something to keep in mind while you walk the line of multiple Twitter accounts. More »

Shattered glass and everything.

It’s important to have, so thus: tonight’s project was spent creating a page-not-found page. I went against the grain on this one, choosing to berate my user rather than even remotely try to help them. Why? For one thing, they should never see this page anyway, and two, if they do see it, I want them to have a little fun. More »

I’ve been told more than once that project management is like spinning plates; you’ve got to stay attentive to keep them all going without letting anything drop. Taking a step back, I see that all areas of life are like that — except riding a bike of course, the cycling industry has an incredible PR firm.

My plan for this blog is to describe how I keep my plates spinning, and from time-to-time offer some advice on how to keep yours spinning, too. More »