A Work in Progress
A Work in Progress
2 min readDusk started out as a way for me to wrap my head around the latest techniques for building websites. It is primarily a portfolio site but it is also much more, a little back story first.
In a previous post I got a little heavy about where I’ve been and what has been happening in my life for the past 6 years. It also touched on some places that I’ve worked at, the primary one being HP. While I was working at HP — 4 years total — there wasn’t really much time for trying out the latest advances in web development, I was having to build and manage websites using Dreamweaver templates… from 2009 right up until I left in 2012. The sites had to work in Internet Explorer 6 and be viewable on monitors with a resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher, the latter wasn’t too much of an issue but the former, ouch! that was a royal pain in the ass. I knew about it when a site didn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 because a large portion of people internally were still running Windows XP with IE6. There was no room to introduce any new CSS or even much JavaScript into the templates, everything was locked down, prescribed and corporate.
So why didn’t I just work on my own projects in the evenings and weekends then? That would of been a good way to stay up-to-date with the latest techniques of web development and this could of worked. I tried a few times but there was one major road block, California is 9 hours behind Sweden/Norway. This meant more often than not I was staying up until 10pm on conference calls, a downside of working from home in a foreign country I guess. And those Americans sure do like conference calls too, some weeks would see 4 conference calls scheduled, each on a different night and each lasting at least 1 hour. Who feels like being creative and trying out new development techniques after that? I sure as hell didn’t. By the time the weekends rolled around all I wanted to do was leave the house and go hiking, which I did. This was great for my photography but not so great for my web development skills. There were other things also, like moving countries three separate times and everything that comes with that, having a child, trying to learn foreign languages… plus plenty more.
This might sound like one big giant excuse. I should know JavaScript inside out, my HTML should be 5, all my CSS should be written using preprocessors and I should be using task-runners to minify, concatenate, preprocess, optimize, test and lint all of the above.
I’m working on it
Dusk is about me getting up to speed and trying out these new techniques and ideas. I have already picked up on using SASS (CSS preprocessing), using CSS3 features and structuring my markup using HTML5 elements. After living under a rock these past 6 years I am super excited to finally have the desire to learn again. So much so that I have started doing online courses to learn more about design also. While they cannot compete with a bachelor degree in design, it’s something for while I’m living in Norway. I have also started work on version 2 of this site. It’s a work in progress!
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