Jake Dahn /

I’ve been working a good amount with static sites in the last few days, and every time I start a new project I have to take 5-10min to get my environment setup to get things started. I finally took my most common elements and included them into a bundle and threw it on github.

I was contemplating adding Cufon to the mix, but with @font-face stuff exploding this week I figured it’d be ok to leave it out. The simpler the better.

Anyway, if you would like to check it out visit here: http://github.com/jakedahn/Static-Project-Framework/tree/master

I was playing with Tiction today to blow off some creative steam and cure some boredom of school work. I recorded a bit of what I was doing and it should be playable at the bottom of the post. Also here is a screenshot of the setup I was working with:

Download here: mp3

Last night while I was getting ready for sleep I had a passing thought that was pretty much summed up by “I always seem to outgrow design, while I always seem to grow with coding.” This one concept is why I will always consider myself more of a developer than a designer. This may or not be a similar mindset to other web developers, please let me know in the comments.

I have a preconceived notion that I was born to work with computers but at the same time I have an unbearably short attention span which breaks the developer mindset and forces me to have a fallback activity.

If I do not have more than one thing to work on at a time I will become very unproductive because I will just sit there and stare at a blank wall rather than work on the main project at hand. Simply because I get bored and unfocussed so easily.

Design is my fallback activity. When I’m completely exhausted with everything I’m doing, or if I am having a hard time focussing, it is always easy to turn up the music and let the ideas flow.

But it is just that: a fallback. I always feel like there is something I’m not getting right when I’m working with design and when I finally get something right I’m so fucking exhausted with the design process that I just want to quit and never do it again. (this lasts for 12-72hr normally)

In that sense I outgrow the design that I was working on and I really can’t seem to like whatever it is that I was working on.

In contrast when I’m working with code and I finally get something right, its exhilarating and it leaves me wanting to do more and more. As Tyler put it in one of our old conversations (whether he remembers saying it or not) “Accomplishment is one hell of a drug.”

… and that’s probably something I will only ever experience when working with code.

I want a live development team that I can meet up with weekly, set a topic or project that we should be working on, and just jam the fuck out with design and code. I’ve been doing weekly VoIP calls with Danny for the last few weeks and the original idea was to set a project or list of things that we wanted to work on, and keep a conversation going steady so there is always information and ideas flowing. Having the information flow really makes web development fun and exciting and even though the topics of conversation sporadically switch, it is easy to remain focussed on what you set out to work on.

While I think that doing voice chat is really the best way of simulating a live development team, it is seriously flawed. He lives in California and I live in Minnesota. The easiest way of communication is via voice, because while you’re working you can talk about different things and keep up the information flow. If you have video you end up looking at it too much and not focussing on the work/tasks at hand. Text chat doesn’t work simply because there is no flow, everytime you look away from your IM window that flow is truncated and your mind is elsewhere. I think the truly best way of going about a live development team and having productive sessions is to get a huge table or put some desks together, have everyone sit in a circle/square with their laptops and just start working.

Here is my vision for a local dev team:

So what I really want is to get a local group of people together that are all fairly/very/extremely capable in things like UI design, frontend code(xhtml/css/js), backend code(php, ruby), task management, and writing. The skills that I outline come into play for the different roles of people in the team. I think for it to be an effective session there must be a few roles for each session.
Each role should include:

• A designer who has a quick keen eye in design and can spot things that need to be fixed, as well as creating a visual attraction out of nothing.
• One or two frontend coders who would work closely with the designer to develop the markup content, css styles, and javascript interaction.
• Then there must be at least one or two backend coders who would be creating the driving force behind each and every project.

A few caveats with the idea so far are as follows. I know local people who hate php, and I know local people who love it, so preferably I would like the group to be language agnostic and use whichever language best satisfies the project’s needs. The last role that needs to be present is someone to be a task manager. There is a dire need for a task manager because if you know any web developers, you know that if they’re together without someone to enforce productivity they’ll be looking at lolcats or something equally retarded within 40seconds. The task manager may not be having as much fun as the rest of the group if thats all they are doing, so perhaps they can be one of the secondary frontend or backend coders.

I want this group to meet one night a week. Each session should consist of 30minutes-1hour for planning, and 2-2.5hr of working time. The planning session should include writing of a task list (things to accomplish), assignment of participant roles, and group discussion of the project at hand so everyone has a good understanding of what they are doing; and it should NOT last more than 1hr (lower time the better, as it makes for more development time). I think splitting up the roles between everybody will make the development much quicker, and much more fun as long, as everyone is developing/designing at a similar speed. When and if someone is falling behind, it is the teams job to help that person out in the quickest most effective way possible.

One of the biggest things to keep in mind while working in the group and finding new participants is to stress the idea that the group exists solely for fun and small amounts of money. The group is NOT to take any client projects. The group’s purpose is to create projects that are great to use, and fun to work on. If a project makes money, so be it, but that is not the purpose of the group. Having an environment like this will promote expression of ideas that normally would not make it into a real project because it may be non-sensical.

Right now I can only think of one or two people who would be up for something like this, as well as my friend who is in training. Granted the friend in training is still at the lower level of both the speed and skill at which I would like to be working at, I think his being part of the group would be extremely beneficial as he would probably learn more in a 3hour session than an entire week of reading books.

If you are local, and want to join a dev team that does shit solely for fun, one night a week, ping me in the comments or shoot me an email at jake@hyperboledesign.com

Oh and our name is Markup Is Art

The last few days have been pretty damn busy. Juggling a metric shit ton of projects for shits and giggles on top of real work. I assume the next week is going to be just as, if not more busy. I’ve got to write up another catalogue for my art history class which takes a good number of hours to complete. I’m thinking about finishing half of them tomorrow night and the other half on sunday, even though its not due until the 17th.

Having become unforeseeably busy, I’m probably going to push back the live updates to the design a few more days until I can get a grasp on everything else. But no worries the changes are already being made, they’re just not live yet.

Besides projects, my friend Brad joined GrandpaGeorge as an intern today. I’ve been bitching at him for countless days, weeks, and months to learn how to code, and I think that having been put in a situation where some pressure is applied and people depend on him for items, he will learn quickly, and efficiently. That is my hope anyway.

Ever since I started working on/over the internet, I’ve wanted to have all of my friends here in one local place so we could just get together, stock up on caffeine and hack together a project. Its always been something that I’ve wanted to have available to me, a team of friends that want to work on a web project for fun. So hopefully I can convince bryan culver and Danny to move to minnesota. Then I’ll have an entire team of people to work with on awesome projects.

that said, its almost 3am, and its time for sleep, dammit.