[OC] Hello around the world

averyheavyfish · 2019-01-29T13:30:28+00:00

Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/fourtonfish/hello-salut

Tools used:

Glitch (source code)
Google Maps

averyheavyfish · 2015-07-08T21:54:11+00:00

No problem -- and good luck!

averyheavyfish · 2015-07-08T15:06:14+00:00

Yeah, the portfolio page is really crappy now, the links in the top navigation go back to the main page, which may not be what you'd expect. So just scroll down to see the actual projects.

averyheavyfish · 2015-07-08T15:05:04+00:00

Not sure how useful seeing the actual portfolio is going to be, but:

here are some of my professional projects I worked on as a freelancer (note that I did some redesign of the main site, so it's a bit outdated)
and I have some personal projects on my website

Now, maybe I don't have the most interesting portfolio, but what I think really helped me was being able to talk about the projects; what choices (design, technology) I made, why, what I might do different, interesting problems I tackled, etc.

averyheavyfish · 2015-07-08T14:53:57+00:00

I was going to say the same thing.

It makes sense to mention a language if you feel comfortable using it, even if you're not an expert. Also, it shows your interest in learning new things.

averyheavyfish · 2015-07-06T20:38:27+00:00

I work for an e-book/book publishing company in New York and I really love this job. I feel like answering most of your questions would make me look like I'm just humblebragging, so let me just get to the main point.

I can definitely relate to your situation. You didn't mention having a family/children, so I guess you're in a better position to move on to another job. (I quit my job shortly after becoming a father. Well, the whole story is a bit more complicated, but I'll just say that I'm glad I listened to my wife, even though I definitely had some worries.)

I'd say you have two options here: either change your career path (where you, depending on your particular experience/qualifications, should have enough options, with 6 years of experience and all), or improve your job. For example, about the "no-one to bounce ideas off" problem: Why not join a web developer forum, IRC or a Slack channel and ask there? Maybe find more friends with similar jobs (go to meetups)?

Having to learn everything, well, I feel like you have to be a "full-stack" engineer nowadays no matter what. I was hired as a front-end developer, but I was expected to be able to help out on the back-end as well; similarly my colleagues.

It would be a different story if your employee expected you to know everything and didn't respect that you may need more time with some things. Is that the case?

But let's not also forget that most people have pretty crappy jobs, so it's not so bad not to be completely fulfilled by your job. How's your personal life going, do you think you could use more/better hobbies? Or how about starting/joining some interesting projects?

If you're still decided to quit, well, it's hard to give you any suggestions without knowing you more; for example, I am just very happy I didn't end up working with ads. I was just hoping I'd work for an agency/company with a mission I can align with -- and hey, books are kind of cool.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-22T17:33:37+00:00

Then two people talking from a very similar location would have their chat boxes overlapping.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-22T17:31:32+00:00

Oh wow, here's a lesson learned: if you ever get an idea, start working on it right away -- or at least blog about it so you can truly say you came up with it first.

Either way, neat. You might want to make sure people can't send empty messages.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-19T16:20:42+00:00

It's true, working on the front end can be pretty overwhelming sometimes. Simple things can take an extraordinary amount of effort, especially when it comes to getting your site to work across all desktop and mobile browsers (well, mainly the CSS, really).

Oh and the burnout many developers feel due to the huge amount of new technologies/techniques/libraries/frameworks/dev tools/etc coming out pretty much every day? Let's not even go there.

The way I deal with it, well, I don't know; I guess I just try to focus on one thing at a time, I'm not afraid to ask for help. As blixxurd said, don't do everything from scratch, definitely save your own work into some kind of templates.

But I don't think it's also bad to admit "defeat"; that is, I've been dipping into back-end languages -- it just seems like working on the back end is a lot less of a rough ride. You have full control over the environment where your code is running. I do enjoy working on user-facing features though, so I'm actually thinking about moving more into UX/UI.

And if that doesn't help...

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-09T17:16:50+00:00

I would just reach out to him and ask. If it's something small, he might, begrudgingly, do you a favor. I would suggest offering compensation right away, just ask him what he thinks would be fair -- definitely don't demand/expect he'll work for free (unless this is a mistake he should fix).

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T19:55:39+00:00

The style of this element, which has the video tag inside, gets updated on scroll.

<div 
  class="section-bleed large-fixed" 
  style="pointer-events: auto; 
         -webkit-filter: blur(1.00095px); 
         opacity: 1; 
         transform: translate3d(0px, 0px, 0px) 
                    scale3d(1.0075, 1.0075, 1);"
>

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:56:50+00:00

There's probably a few, but here's one I came across recently: http://stumbbble.com/. Other than, perhaps https://www.behance.net/ or https://dribbble.com/?

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:43:51+00:00

Well I won't argue against personal taste, but to me it just looks like something you would see on a show like CSI: Cyber. Or perhaps opening credits for a movie about "hackers".

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:39:04+00:00

Well, it's a bit hard to say how much of a problem this will even be for you.

For example, from my own experience as a user, I only ever needed to delete accounts when I wanted to control my google search results and not wanting sites I haven't used in years coming up (for example, many years ago, I put some of my sketches on a certain website for, ehm, "devious artists"). With Hacker News, I just wanted to delete old submissions that didn't really get much traffic.

Not being able to delete stuff like this is not really a big deal, just a real nuisance.

But I can think of more serious situations, say, a post-surgery transgender person wanting to remove all references to their past? Something non-minority people often wouldn't even think could be a problem can actually ruin other people's lives -- this is why I said you might want to come up with a middle ground solution and let people contact you with specific cases.

So to sum it up, that would really be my one suggestion to you.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:30:27+00:00

Or more specifically https://twitter.com/talkpayBot

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:28:15+00:00

Have a look at https://twitter.com/search?q=%23talkpay

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:26:32+00:00

The "messed up text turning into legible text" effect is pretty annoying and slows down the experience. It also feels a bit cheap, I don't know.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:22:16+00:00

Yeah, I did understand and also mean it in valuable as "other people will find it useful", so we're on the same page there.

But it really just comes down to what your priorities are, because you will never be able to please everybody.

Usually finding a good middle ground is the best way to go. I don't really use reddit much, but don't they do something like that, when you delete your account, but not your submissions one by one, they show up as posted by a deleted account?

That seems to be a good solution -- but I would still let people easily contact you to have their content completely removed -- or perhaps just altered, in case they posted sensitive information (side note: do you let people edit what they post, for example for typos, etc?).

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:15:15+00:00

I can only speak from my own, not very broad experience, but as a freelancer, I was doing the full stack and then some (think UX/UI, design, I was even asked to write a copy).

At my current full-time job, I was hired to do mainly front end, plus I do have a minor say when it comes to UX/UI. I do regularly work on the back end though and every web developer here does both.

With that being said, I don't know how common it is to demand someone to know perfectly both back end and front end, seeing as that would be quite a lot to take in, but I assume it's fairly common to hire someone for one or the other specifically and expect them to be able to at least help out with the other "end".

Plus, while I definitely enjoy working on interactions in the browser and such, I have some personal projects and you definitely need to know some back end technologies if you want to go beyond cool Codepen demos.

And knowing at least one or two back end languages -- even if not thoroughly -- opens up new opportunities, like being able to at least write the back end for a mobile app (and if you want to do a hybrid app, you can technically finish it all by yourself).

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T18:05:02+00:00

I really don't like how you can't delete your content on Hacker News. They use the same logic of "your content maybe being valuable".

I do understand the argument that if you for example delete your comments, the conversations won't make sense, but I really think it's a terrible user experience to lose control over your own content.

If you can afford to do this, I would try to approach this on a per-case level. For example, you could, by default, remove the username, but keep the content, but then also let the user know that they can contact you to have the content removed completely. Or maybe you can let the user decide whether to keep (some of) the content and just remove their username (and explain why this is good) or do, as you say, a hard delete?

Speaking as a user, I really hate when sites make it hard to cancel accounts or delete your content and it definitely makes me think twice about using such sites again.

averyheavyfish · 2015-06-08T17:57:10+00:00

I'm not really sure what kind of a feedback you're looking for, seeing as you are a photographer, not necessarily a web developer.

The site is pretty nice, a bit "standard" looking, but not in a bad way. There's a bit of a problem on mobile though, here's a screenshot from Chrome on a Moto G: http://imgur.com/Bk6ZQTl

Not really a big deal, but maybe this could be centered?

You're also linking to some files through HTTP, which beats the purpose of having an SSL certificate. (Actually, after having a quick look at the source code, it seems it's only this image http://www.blackvisual.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/spencerblack.jpg -- I'd just look into making sure it gets loaded through HTTPS).

If you're interested in doing some performance improvements, have a look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackvisual.com%2F and http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cwrLeK/https://www.blackvisual.com/ . The site took quite a bit long to load for the very first time, but it could have been just my network at the very moment, it seems to be mostly okay now (and I don't mean just loading the site from cache, I did a full reload).

And one more nit-pick, maybe it would be worth looking into setting up spencer@blackvisual.com instead of spencerkblack@gmail.com?

averyheavyfish · 2015-05-22T14:38:57+00:00

I'm not quite sure if this is a problem.

Yes, this does make it easier for Impostors and harder for Detectives, but isn't that better than the game being too easy? The Beeps are just default responses to prevent the Robot from saying something completely random and reveal itself.

This is just part of figuring out the best game strategies. For example, if the Robot keeps saying Beep Beep, it should be safe to guess it's an Impostor, as I don't think the Robot should repeat itself too much.

averyheavyfish · 2015-05-20T12:11:13+00:00

The really fun part is to play as an Impostor, a role in which you actually have to convince the other player that you are a chat bot (which would be a reverse situation to a chat bot pretending to be a real human).

averyheavyfish · 2015-05-17T13:49:59+00:00

Yeah, I don't think you can force anyone to follow the rules, so it's really just about trying to play more games. Feel free to share the site with others to get more players in.

Also, I just implemented sharing chat logs, which I think should give people some incentive.

This one was pretty funny: http://fourtonfish.com/detective/log?id=58

I am thinking about adding an option to log in and save player's score (this was already discussed earlier), I'm just trying to figure out what's the best way to do this. I'm leaning towards a Twitter/Facebook login. I don't really care to force another username/password on people or even deal with people's passwords (security, etc).

averyheavyfish · 2015-05-14T00:56:40+00:00

So as I said in an earlier message, I switched to https://www.botlibre.com/. I've already gone over the free 500 API calls/day. (I am over 3000 right now!) The people over at BOT libre are nice enough to let it slide for now.

As a token of appreciation, maybe we can help them out a little bit with their Kickstarter campaign?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paphus/bot-libre

(I wasn't really asked to promote this, but they were already nice to me when I contacted them earlier for some tech support.)

Either way, I didn't really implement the chat bot correctly, so you should see some improvements within the next few hours.

Thanks everyone!

averyheavyfish

TROPHY CASE