Category Archives: posts

Dusting Things Off

posts,

It’s been a long while since I last blogged on the site.  A lot has happened in my life and my career changed in order to focus more on the human side of technology.  However, those aren’t excuses for the absence I have had from this blog.  If I ever had an excuse was simply writer’s block as nothing has inspired me to write. But that’s changing.  Old habits are returning and that means more blog posts and more content.

To start – my 4 main / current NPM packages have been updated in order to get them up to speed with Node v0.12 as well as to make them compatible with Browserify.  I may add Bower support later but right now, it is what it is.  Along with these changes, I updated the interface making a couple of them 2.0 releases.  You can find more information about the packages at the links below.

luhn – https://www.npmjs.com/package/luhn

requiredir – https://www.npmjs.com/package/requiredir

datevalidator – https://www.npmjs.com/package/datevalidator

abavalidator – https://www.npmjs.com/package/abavalidator

In addition to updating those packages, I’m also resurrecting some old Node.js projects that I had worked on over the last 2 years and begin to add them to Github.  Lastly, you can expect more Node.js and iOS development posts on here with a sprinkling of UX.  I believe in the importance of transparency in learning and I can practice my development skills a lot easier than my User Experience skills.

More to come soon.

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Redesigning the Save Button Is the Wrong Approach

posts

Every once in a while, I come across an article about someone talking about how antiquated the floppy disk icon of Save has become.  They talk about how many office documents of today would not have fit onto the 1.44mb capacity of a floppy disk and as new generations of computer users arrive onto the scene, many have never used a floppy disk.  Obviously the icon needs redesigned these individuals discuss; however, I say it doesn’t need redesigned – the button itself needs to be removed altogether.

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Giving an e-Gift could be Better

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It’s October and that means many retailers are beginning to finalize their Holiday plans and queuing everything up for release in the next month or so. While some retailers have their Christmas and other holiday decorations up already, most e-commerce websites won’t be rolling that out for another month.  It’s also around this time of year that I remember how terrible of an experience gifting digital downloads remains.

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Get A Job!

posts, Presentations

Back in April of 2012, I did a presentation at the Kansas City Developers Conference on tips and tricks to finding and landing your dream job. Having been through a number of interviews as both an interviewer as well as someone trying to get hired over the last handful of years, I have had the opportunity to see what things are important to both sides of the table. In the end, both parties need to make sure that the other side is right for them and it’s not just a one-way relationship.

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Using NPM Scripts for Client-Side Module Installation

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One of the largest things that I have loved about working in Node.js is the ability to create utilities that work on both the server and within the browsers.  Being able to create packages for NPM and then reuse them in both environments has lead to a lot of shared and unified code.  However, the general experience involving installing a package and moving it to the client left a lot to be desired.  Thankfully, NPM offers a possible solution through it’s use of scripts.

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Easier module imports with Requiredir

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The more that I use Node.js, the more I enjoy it; however, there I have seen an issue in a couple of projects.  In these projects, some modules import in a large number of other modules that reside in single directory.  While it could be argued that the code could be refactored differently, scenarios exist where you may need to import in a number of modules that all exist in the same directory.

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luhn – simple credit card validation for JavaScript and Node.js

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If you’ve worked on websites for any amount of time, there is a decent chance that you’ve encountered the need to validate credit card numbers at some point.  While there are a lot of compliance and security guidelines for working with credit card numbers, these don’t reduce the need for ensuring the user entered a valid credit card number into the form.  Some places will validate just length and ensure only numeric digits were provided; however, did you know there’s an algorithm that most credit cards are based on?

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DateValidator – Simple Validation for Node.js

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While I’m passionate about user experience, I also spend a lot of time working on various development projects as well.  Recently, I’ve focused most of my efforts behind Node.js and have enjoyed it thoroughly.  The amount of passion and adoption I see around the language astounds me since the language was created just back in 2009.  Though, since Node is written on top of JavaScript, it feels like a much more mature language.  Sadly though, JavaScript isn’t perfect and is missing a lot of common features that other languages have.  Thankfully, the Node community has helped in these shortcomings though the use of NPM, Node’s package management system.

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