[thelist] updating skillset (long rambling request for advice, vague or specific)
David Kaufman
david at gigawatt.com
Fri Sep 22 17:00:29 CDT 2006
Joel D Canfield <joel at spinhead.com> wrote:
> so, I'm being thrust into self-employment again in a few weeks...
Hmm, normally I'd say congratulations are in order! But by your choice
of words I guess self-employment isn't such a welcome state of affairs
for ya. So... my condolences :-)
> ...what skills
> should an experienced but tunnel-visioned developer brush up on to be
> viable as a one-man shop in the freelance world these days? (I'm
> specifically looking for job skills;
At the risk of being buzz-wordy, one word: AJAX. It's usually not "the
job" (few client hire purely JavaScript programmers, tho perhaps they
should) but is more and more often these days either one requirement for
the job, or at least mentioned as a would-be-nice/plus/bonus bullet
point on the job req's. Regardless of your backend web app flavor of
choice, be that Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby {would you like Rails with
that?], JSP, CFM, .Net/C#, or what-have-you -- even (horrors!) static
HTML... the one thing that everyone wants is Web 2.0-style web pages
that actually employ good use of, to dispense with the contrived
Acronymic technologies: dynamic loading of remote data without those
obsolete page-loads and advanced DHTML visual effects.
Though AJAX itself (loading remote data and updating a page using
javascript and not a page load) and the more "fluffy" visual effects
often associated with it are of course entirely different things,
nontechnical people lump the two strongly together, probably because
they complement each other. When you load some new bit of data
dynamically, popping that into the page using javascript is nice, but
adding a highlight color, fade-in, slide-in or scroll-in effect is not
only attractive it's good UI design to provide visual feedback to the
user that something "just happened".
I'm getting a lot of clients asking for it, and a lot of resistance from
other programmers who prefer to think of themselves as SQL and backend
PHP/Perl/CF/JSP gear-heads. Doing AJAX the way these clients want it
done requires a combination of back-end coding skills, graphic design
sense and high-end DOM/JS chops that is hard to come by, whether in one
freelancer or in a whole team!
> ... I know what I need to know [for
> now] about how to run a business and how to keep my life in balance;
> mostly 'cause Best Beloved helps me with both.)
>
> Thanks muchly for any words at all.
<rant> How 'bout these? Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Must be the
most contrived acronym yet! Javascript is almost always abbreviated as
JS, not J. So it Should really be:
AJSAX
and XML itself is of course another acronym and you can't really have an
acronym *of* acronyms, can you? So you have to interpolate there:
AJSAXML
and while we're at it, might as well take the opportunity now to correct
that unfortunate mistake of history in which someone (surely an deeply
underpaid clerical assistant) made that typo in the acronym XML in which
the first letter was supposed to stand for Extensible, (ostensibly *not*
for X-tense-ible) giving us:
AJSAEML
And hey, what's with that "and"? And isn't an important word -- that's
just making our acronymical adventure needlessly long. Lets cut the
cruft shall we?
AJSEML
And, I just remembered, Javascript isn't even called Javascript anymore
because Netscape (just before gasping their last breath) wouldn't open
it up as a standard, forcing the developer community to re-acronymilate
that as ECMAScript, remember?
AECMASEML
But, you know what? Come to think of it, I hardly do any Web-2.0 work
at that still uses (what we used to call) Javascript programming. You
know, huge blocks of global variables, global functions, procedural code
and browser hacks. With Prototype and Scriptaculous, all of our new
AECMASEML development looks a helluva lot more like Ruby or Haskell or
some other purely functional language than JS always did in days gone
by. In fact, we don't even name functions anymore! They're all
anonymous inline-literals in squirrelly brackets, or re-used code
closure objects stuffed into in an object attribute somewheres as scalar
variable data of type "code". Just about the only thing left of
"Javascript" that we rely on *these* days is that one actual (and
relatively late-arriving) XMLHttpRequest object that Javascript gave us
...the one that made AJAX, and with it our exit from Javascript
Programming, and in fact, the whole Web 2.0 revolution, possible in the
first place! So I'd certainly rather my acronyms pay homage to that
thing, than the word "Javascript" (which has such a 1990's aura around
it). So, credit where credit's due:
A-XMLHttpRequest-EML ?
No, then we're back in recursive acronym land. XMLHttpRequest,
presumably stands for Extensible Markup Language HypertText Transport
Protocol Request, right? I'll really buck the system here and argue
that the word "HypertText", though StudlyCapped, is still just one word,
and therefore does not deserve an allotment of two letters in our
already busy acronym. Aside from the fact that, should the world
embraces my argument then that means updating all those existing URL's
(um, counts on fingers, then toes.. about a kajillion) scattered across
every nook and cranny of the planet, inanely misspelled
http://...something,
So far I'm up to AEMLHTPREML.
I still have to work in the concept Discreet Visual Effects And
Transitions To Augment Usability in there somewhere, since that IMO
simply cannot be ignored in any serious discussion -- or acronym -- of
What We Used To Call AJAX. but I think we may be onto something here!
All I need to do now is to write an AWP (A White Paper).
Good luck in the contract web dev world, Joel!
-dave
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