Cory Collier

Web Development is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Nearly every day some new product or development turns the whole scene on it’s head. Just a dozen years ago, the thought of being a web developer was less than promising for most folks. Today, that’s quite different.

There’s a huge catch in all of this though. Web developers are quite possibly the dumbest professionals on the earth. No other industry sees it’s standard salaries and income vary as much as the web development industry. Imagine trying to pick between one lawyer who charges $300 / hr, or one that charges $10 / hr. The cheaper one sounds enticing, but we all know you usually get what you pay for.

That’s the trouble with the web. Because so many developers are willing to provide services for next to nothing (for a variety of reasons), the entire industry suffers. There’s just not much consistency in what people expect to pay for professional web dev services.

And now, professional companies are starting to get into this mindset as well. As I’ve been trolling for steady jobs, I’ve seen tons of positions open for senior web developers that pay $15 to $20 / hr.

That’s an insultingly low rate to pay a senior web developer. The skillset and intelligence required to perform solid web development duties is typically on par with my own background in structural and civil engineering. This stuff is complicated, and $15  / hr isn’t reflective of the skill required to successfully create and implement a good web app.

So, what will likely happen, is good paying jobs will be more geo-centric to tech hubs throughout the country (New York, San Francisco, etc..), and the remaining web development work will be limited to implementations of the products that come out of those areas.

The variety that’s made the web so intriguing for years, will likely fade to a much more bland version of the web, filled with millions of cookie-cutter websites about uninteresting products and services.

It’s frustrating, because even some of my closest friends feel the need to undercut their services to get work. My own colleagues and buddies are helping to enforce the un-sustainability of our own careers.

I just got back from FOWA Miami 2009. The event was awesome and I met tons of amazing folks (including the amazing Gary Vaynerchuk). There were plenty of amazing tech revelations at the event, and more talk about business and marketing. The latter was more relevant for me.

While there was definitely a lot of good talks during FOWA, a few really stood out for me: Jason Fried, Joel Spolsky, and Gary Vaynerchuck. Since I was recently laid off, I’ve been looking for some guidance in how I’m going to approach working independently. The take away from those three speakers was: Don’t learn from failure, but success, eliminate distractions when working on code, and ‘Care’. Continue reading »

Part of my transition to independent web developer, is to put on a hat I’ve gotten used to letting someone else take care of. That would be the designer hat.

:/

I’ve done some massive modifications of some of the older sites I’ve built in the past. Those sites, oconnorandtaylor.com, socons.com, and tradeproconstructionservices.com (go ahead and catch your breath), have taken up a substantial part of my life in the last couple weeks.

There’s not much coding going on in those sites. I built them on Drupal, so most of my work revolved around configuring the CMS, and getting everything setup in remote subversion. The task consuming all my time though, is the designing.

When I design a site, especially one that I’m getting paid a nominal fee for, I usually base the design off of some template, or theme to one of the more popular CMS packages. I know Drupal pretty well, so It’s not too much to hack a Wordpress or Joomla theme and make it work for Drupal.

The interesting thing about all of this however, is my keen interest in Flash. It’s funny to me, since I’ve been pretty anti-flash for a while. Actionscript 3 really provides a framework that I can get comfy in. I’ve yet to actually put anything out there that uses some of the more OO type patterns (observer being a quite common implementation). I suspect I will in the coming months though.

Anyways, I’m not a designer, so I’d like any feedback on the sites mentioned above. Some of y’all are pretty good at that kind of thing, and I could use the advice.

Thanks in advance.

Dr. Doom.

Recently, I had to write some javascript for field validation of a form. I wanted to be able to create a div element to cover the entire page, then display a modal window above that describing the user’s error. This required me to know the existing dimensions of the user’s browser window.

That’s not handled the same from browser to browser. The most notable difficulty is handling users with Internet Explorer (very common problem). I wrote all of the field validation and message creating myself, and I relied on a piece of code from David Flanagan’s Javascript 5 for determining window sizes.

Everything was working fine, until someone used IE6 to test. Of course, my code failed. I went through everything, looking for the culprit behind my disdain. Eventually, Derek got involved and we started checking the code out line by line.

It turns out, the error wasn’t mine. The error belongs to David Flanagan, a well respected and published software author! The root of all evil lied in his code for determining the coordinates of the browser on the users screen.

Examine the code below:

var Geometry = {};

if (window.screenLeft) { // IE and others
    Geometry.getWindowX = function() { return window.screenLeft; };
    Geometry.getWindowY = function() { return window.screenTop; };
}
else if (window.screenX) { // Firefox and others
    Geometry.getWindowX = function() { return window.screenX; };
    Geometry.getWindowY = function() { return window.screenY; };
}

What happens when the window position (top or left) is zero? Think about that for a minute before you answer. In Javascript, the number 0 has more than one meaning, doesn’t it?

Then..

function() { return window.screenLeft; };

function() { return 0; };

which is equal to...

function(){ false;}

So when I was trying to access Geometry.getWindowX(), I get “Geometry.getWindowX is not a function”.

Here come the naysayers with their proof positive of why a loosely typed language is a bad idea. I hear what you guys are saying, and I still think you’re wrong. There’s a fix to this:

if (typeof(window.screenLeft) == 'number') { // IE and others
	Geometry.getWindowX 			= function() { return window.screenLeft; };
	Geometry.getWindowY 			= function() { return window.screenTop; };
}

Notice how I merely prefix the javascript function ‘typeof’ to my if statement? That function returns a string describing the type of argument passed to it. Just by adding that function, my code was working. It sort of ‘hints’ to javascript what type to expect from the window and document objects. It’s not typecasting, but it’s just enough to make sure that Javascript is interpreting the number 0 as a number and not a boolean false.

For you developers out there, it’s worth your while to look around and see where you’re creating eventhandlers or callbacks where your return type might not be what you want it to be.

I checked David Flanagan’s site for any listing of errata, and came up with nothing. I know this is wrong, since I’ve seen a listing of known errors before. I didn’t see a way to contact him regarding the error, so I can only assume he’s aware of it, and doesn’t care about nit-pickers like me.

That’s fine with me.