The following is an email exchange I had with a friend at another company about a year ago. We were talking about the best way to go about hiring a front-end developer, and I was sharing some tips from our hiring process.
“Hi Scott, we are in need of a CSS expert/ninja. Our company has gone through agencies and the whatnot, but the candidates that have come from that route haven’t exactly knocked our socks off. I’m hoping that since this is what you do you might know some people, have some advice, or know some agencies that specialize in this area.”
I’ll tell you how we found Libby, our other CSS rockstar.
If you haven’t already, set aside ten minutes to fill out the annual “State of the Web” survey from A List Apart. This kind of data is important to gain an understanding of our community and profession, not just for ourselves, but the rest of the world.
The data that you provide and we analyze is the only significant information about our profession as a profession to be published anywhere, by anyone. That makes it important.
When it’s time for a post-mortem meeting, do people in your office groan and make excuses? Do your coworkers complain that they’re too busy with client work to attend? Do post-mortems feel like a chore with no payoff?
I think everyone agrees that post-mortems are a great idea, in theory. When you finish a project, you get everyone from the team together to talk about what went well and what went poorly. Ideally, the knowledge gained is shared with the rest of the company, and you can avoid making the same mistakes over and over.
In reality, however, I’ve found that most offices either skip post-mortems entirely, or they’re so poorly run that everyone resents them. In many cases, the post-mortem meeting is run by the project manager or team lead, who is understandably motivated to find the project was a success.
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I recently got an iPhone, and like any good geek, immediately started banging my head against things I didn’t know how to do. If you’ve had an iPhone for awhile now, you probably already know these, but if you’re a newbie like me, these tips may help you out. Some of these tips will only work on the 3GS.
Use Google Sync to sync your contacts, calendars, and gmail
I was able to get my gmail to load on my iPhone using IMAP pretty easily, but it was trickier to get my contacts to sync. At first I was using iTunes to sync my contacts, but that would grab EVERY gmail contact, and didn’t get my calendars. Google Sync is the way to get around that. Basically, it sets up an exchange connection, and then your contacts on your iPhone are synced with the “My Contacts” group in your gmail contacts.
Email Full-Resolution Photos
I love uploading photos from my phone to Flickr, but by default the iPhone sends smaller resized versions. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to get the full-size ones. Just press and hold on a photo in your gallery until you get the copy option, and then paste it into your email to send to Flickr. Works like a charm.
Enable Autofill in Safari
Despite the fact that the Autofill button is visible on every form in Safari, it doesn’t work unless you enable the option in Preferences. Why isn’t this enabled by default?
Make Your Own Ringtones For Free
It’s really easy – just take an MP3, convert it to AAC, and then change the extention to M4R, and when you import it into iTunes, it’ll show up as a ringtone. I did it, and now I have the greatest ringtone ever.
Make Your Logon Screen Transparent
Simple trick to make it look like your login screen is a pane of frosted glass, letting you see your icons underneath.
When I upgraded my Wordpress installation recently, I ran into a chracter encoding problem. Long story short, it turns out that older Wordpress installations like mine tend to have been created in latin1, but the data is actually being saved in UTF8. If you update your wp-config file to a newer version, it adds a DB_CHARSET option, which will cause your site to puke, because the database character set doesn’t match the data that’s actually stored in it.
Thankfully, the fix is relatively simple, if a bit of a hassle:
- From your command line, use the
mysqldumpcommand to export your database inlatin1format. Since MySQL sees your database is already inlatin1format, it won’t re-encode it (which would break theUTF8data in the database). The command should look something like this:mysqldump -u username -p --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 databasename > databasename.sql
Note: You must do this from the command line, because PHPMyAdmin doesn’t allow you to specify the characterset of the export file, so you will end up with re-encoded data, that will get scrambled and kill your database.
- Copy that dump file somewhere safe for a backup, in case something goes wrong.
- Using a text editor, open the MySQL dump file and replace all instances of
latin1withutf8. There should be one reference in eachCREATE TABLEline. - Import the database over the top of your existing one. Since you did a complete dump, with the
add-drop-tableoption, this will drop all your existing tables, and recreate them. And since you changed the character sets, this will effectively update your database toUTF8. The command will look something like this:mysql -u username -p databasename < databasename.sql
Now, if you’re anything like me, those instructions are terrifying. But trust me that there is relatively little risk. The very first thing you’re going to do is make a backup. If anything goes wrong, the worst case scenario is that you restore your backup, and you’re back to square one. I can’t tell you that it’s totally safe, but I can assure you that I did this to two of my databases, and it went off without a hitch.
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