Unemployed Developer

Hey everyone, my apologies for being away. I spent most of last week in bed with the flu, the rest of the time was spent trying to get some small work done, but I wasn’t feeling up to snuff when it came to blogging.

I’ll be releasing my review of Balsamiq mockups this week and I’m looking at some PHP tutorials to make some more people PHP geniuses! So stay tuned as I get my feet under me again here.

I just wanted to write a simple and quick tutorial taking our initial Object Oriented JavaScript postings(Object-Oriented JavaScript – Part II (encapsulation) &
Object-Oriented JavaScript – Part I (Objects)) and expand on them using jQuery.

If you recall we had a Person object and a getName method inside of it. How would we do this in jQuery?

To run jQuery we need to get the latest library file from their website. Or you can connect to the library file on their code repository. But keep in mind if the code repository goes down while your site is up, your JavaScript will become broken. Best practices would be to download the latest library and host it on your server with the rest of your code. For these examples we will explain using the code repository link. Read more »

As a freelancer in the past, present and certainly future I often am faced with many clients who don’t know what they want, especially how much they are willing to pay and what an “average” rate for services is. However, I am also faced with the clients with fixed budgets and they know what they want.

In the past I have offered fixed prices for my work. This method allowed me to attempt to get to know as much as I could in regards to the scope of  project and then bill  accordingly. As I gained more experience as a freelance developer and project estimator, I found myself either billing really high or really low. If I bid really high, this was a positive for me, but not for the client. I had to ask myself, is that really the kind of developer I want to be? Alternately, if I under-priced my bid, then I would find myself quite frustrated for not doing a better job in determining the scope and cost of the project before quoting a rate. This frustration tended to show in the code, as I found myself rushing to finish these projects so I could get back to more lucrative work. Again, I had to ask myself,  is that the kind of developer I wanted to be? In both cases, the answer was a resounding NO! Read more »

As I promised in one of my earlier tutorials: Rounded Corners with CSS3 I would look at an example that used an HTC file to create rounded corners on IE.

I’ve uploaded an example provided by the project owner for you guys to test. The way to do this is relatively simple, just as simple as it was to create rounded corners through “-moz-border-radius” & “-webkit-border-radius”.
Read more »

I came across this link and found it interesting. Adobe Flex Builder 3 is available for free to software developers who are currently unemployed! This opportunity is open to those who qualify, while supplies last.

I signed up and received my free copy, but I haven’t used Adobe Flex prior. However who can turn down a free copy of software? Not I, says the Unemployed Developer. However the terms state that the software is to be used for personal use to improve my skills.

Hopefully this opportunity helps some other developers who are interested in Adobes Flex Software

Well, this post doesn’t have much to do with any type of development. Personally I’ve been a bit slow in getting some new posts out, but in my defense it was Thanksgiving this past weekend, and I’ve been actually getting clients that want my services. I might actually change my plan to become a freelancer if I continue having client success.

This blog has been a bit more successful than I originally planned. Past sites I’ve worked on took forever to reach at least 500 hits a day. It took me 9 days to reach 500 hits. Mind you I didn’t promote the blog until the 7th or 8th day. I’m quite happy with these figures and it makes me want more. I’m also number 1 in Google for the term Unemployed Developer, I like that!

But enough about me, I want to know who you people are, I see an average of 100 people a day who visit my blog as type in traffic or have the site bookmarked in their browser. At the same time I see an average of 300-400 people who come by through the means of referral sites.

I want to know about you guys and what made you visit this site. Are there any topics you would like to see? I have some drafts that I need to finish, but if some interesting topics come up, I would love to research and write about them. Do you want to write for this blog? I’ve already had a good friend Eugene do a post for me on Stored Procedures in Postgres.

For future posts I am planning to do a good review on Balsamiq Mockups which I’ve found to be an incredible piece of software for making mockups in a matter of minutes. However this posting will be delayed as I want to play with this new toy as much as I can and write a very nice tutorial review. I also promised to do a write up of the HTC script for rounded corners in IE, which I’ve tested a bit and had some success. I’m also thinking of doing a PHP tutorial series called “Little Known/Used PHP Function of The Day”, although I don’t know if I an pull off a daily function, maybe it will be “of the moment”.

another note, if you guys like my blog, please help me share the word about it. Link to me, follow me on Twitter, email me with your thoughts, ideas and questions or leave a comment.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Pretty interesting article for stepping into your first iPhone app. Read More…

How to Win Any Job on eLance, oDesk or Guru.com

I found this article really helpful in terms of how to promote myself to prospective freelance clients. It actually already helped me win one job. Although there are some spelling mistakes in it, take what you learn in terms of promotion and selling yourself and put it into your own words. Read More…

How To Write Viral Content For Your Website

Another article on writing, as a blog writer and gaining freelance clients, I find this to be a very important facet of skills that one should learn. It will only help you with your future skills. Read More…

CSS Font-Size: em vs. px vs. pt vs. percent

I’ve always wondered about the differences of defining font sizes in CSS. This article really helped bring clarity to that. Very nice breakdown of em, px, pt, and percent in CSS font sizing. Read More…

I am quite sure most web developers use Firefox as their main browser when developing. I’d like to pass on some tips that we as great and discerning developers should know.

• View Source Line Number

  When I was checking this site for HTML Validation, I found a couple errors in my code, so when I went to view source to see where the issue was, the lack of line numbers makes it hard to find where the issue(s) might be. Pages with multiple lines of code, become a nightmare to debug through this method, unless we use Ctrl-L(Windows and Linux) to search for the line number. This saved me a lot of time when I was doing this HTML Validation debugging!

Read more »

To carry on our tutorial on object oriented JavaScript, as our next step will be on encapsulation.

What is encapsulation? Gary Booch defined encapsulation as “the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation.” Sounds smart eh?

So let’s dummy it down for this example. I’m sure you noticed, and I hope you asked yourself, in our previous examples, what if someone used a method that was being used with one object with another, well that methods scope would be over written by the new one. To ensure that each object can have it’s own method, we would have to write the method in the scope of the object. Did you “whuh?” there again? Maybe a code example will help. Read more »

There are two schools of thought regarding stored procedures. On side for them, you’ll hear about the virtues of cross-language functionality (any language with a Postgres database wrapper can run the functions, saving re-writing in separate libraries), they’re fast (precompiled), they operate in transactions and you can specify varying amounts of permissions. On the side against them, you’ll hear about the difficulty debugging them due to caching issues, testing can be a pain in the butt and deployment isn’t all that fun when you’ve got clustered databases to worry about. I believe there is a use for stored procedures, and, when used correctly, can make for some modular goodness. Firstly, let’s take a look at a sample stored procedure.
Read more »