The Seattle Webdesigner's Meetup

[elfs]

Yesterday, after a grueling ten-hour day where a meeting that was supposed to be just a half hour went on for an hour and forty-five minutes, I packed up my stuff and headed up to the Greenwood district for a meeting with the Seattle Webdesigner's Group. This is one of several groups I've been trying to get to for months, but between the kids and Omaha I have not had many evenings free to myself.

I arrived about an hour early and tried to find myself something to eat. I passed by a place called The Northside Grill, which billed itself as "Where North Africa meets North Seattle" and offered a combination of straight American food alongside a menu of "Moroccan" dishes. I ordered something called the "merguez," which was a sausage sandwich laden with onions and peppers, very spicy and very delicious. Very American french fries went with the meal. When I had first walked by the proprietor was standing in front of the restaurant looking a bit put out that his establishment was still empty at 6:00pm, but after I had puttered about in the game store next door (they were sold out of Marc Miller's Traveller first edition reprint, as well as Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls and Brawl: Catgirls) I went back to the restaurant. Despite being the only customer at the time, it took him a while to assemble my dinner, but it was worth the wait. And they're civilized enough to have a counter, which takes some of the edge off eating alone. If you're in the neighborhood, I recommend the place.

Then I went down to Wayward Coffee. I was one of four attendees in place that night. The other was a retired gentleman teaching himself Flash, a contract web designer, and a test engineer from Microsoft who was looking to "do something else," and so was teaching himself web design in a kind of scrambled way, worrying about CSS on the one hand and C# deployment on the other.

At one point while discussing graphic design issues I made a comment about using ems^[?] versus pixels in design, and the fellow from Microsoft asked "What's an em?" With the encouragement of the organizer, I gave a brief exposition on designing websites with disabled users in mind, showing the three modes with which the SKCCN website could be read by those with low-sight or no-sight.

We went over the difficulty in finding a decent background, and templating schemes, and choices of programming environments. And I got the sense that the Flash guy knew a lot of flash, and the organizer knew a lot of standard HTML, but the world of high-end CSS and Javascript and the deep transactional programming and event knowledge that I carry around inside my head as part of my career was not in theirs.

It's been frustrating. I feel like I'm in a kind of weird limbo, with some graphic design knowledge, some programming skill, and some documentary skill, but not enough to slip into any one of those worlds with authority. Not the jack, but the king of all trades, still master of none.

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

S.P.A.N.C. is awesome. I reccomend it.

[sarienpalth.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think being a Jack- or King-of-All-Trades is important, especially for web development (and in life in general). One of my new media professors described the web as being an odd place for information because you *should* understand something about print, something about layout and design, and something about how to code. He emphasized that the key to being successful was having these basic skills, not necessarily knowing some proprietary technology like Flash or ASP. The ability to adapt to the customer's need (whether that customer is yourself or someone else) instead of being locked into a single-track path was more important.

Quite frankly, being a Jack- or King-of-All-Trades makes you authoritative in your own right as an architect rather than as a developer. While I'm a consultant (and run into the same issues sometimes), I've noticed that I've gotten more job offers because of this.

I'm glad I decided that I was sick of desktop support and wanted to branch out into networking, server administration, and software development.

Well, back to writing Perl code.

"if( stuff!= undef ){ print("Stuff!\n"); }" Sar

[bolindbergh]

Use of uninitialized value in numeric ne (!=)

[sarienpalth.livejournal.com]

True! To be Perl-ly correct (not like I was trying to be), this should be...

...

my $stuff = 1;

if( $stuff != undef )
{
print("Stuff!\n");
}

...

[brannonb.livejournal.com]

Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls is pretty good. It's an easy and fun game for kids as well, as long as you're not too prudish about sexual innuendo (I predict that's not a huge problem in your household).

I didn't know about Brawl: Catgirls. I'll look out for that ;-)