A couple months ago I was at my Alma Mater Adams State College to talk about what I would have wanted to know if I was a student. I’ve been out of college for 3 years now, and held 3 VERY different programming jobs since graduating with my Bachelor’s Degree. I am hoping to shed some light on what I have learned about the "real world" and clear up some misconceptions.

Quick background

I just want to give you enough information about where I’m coming from here. Obviously, your experiences will be different but I think there are several things common to almost all workplaces and that is what this post will focus on.

I have done data-oriented programming, back-end programming, and web programming for a couple small companies and one quite large company. All of these positions were around Northern Colorado/Wyoming so we’re not exactly in Silicon Valley. If you really care about the details you can check out my LinkedIn page.

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It looks like David Baron is working hard on new CSS support for Firefox 3. His latest blog post tells us that he has finished up support for a bunch of CSS3 selectors, available now in the Firefox nightly build:

We now support :nth-child(), :nth-last-child(), :nth-of-type(), and :nth-last-of-type() [...] :first-of-type, :last-of-type, and :only-of-type

This will be released with the next major version of ‘fox (probably 3.1). It looks like support forMedia Queries is next. Hurrah! Good work David! Continue reading →

May was quite a busy month this year wasn’t it? We had NFJS, JavaOne, Firefox 3 is starting to be adopted much more rapidly… phew. Therefore, this month a have a bit larger list of links than usual (and trimmed it down a bunch). All great resources that may not have gotten all the attention they deserved:

CSS

CSS Qualified Selectors [ShaunInman.com] – There could be a proposal to the CSS Working Group for this, and I think that this would be an incredibly useful addition to CSS.

Tomorrow’s CSS today: 8 Techniques They Don’t Want You To Know [Sitepoint] – This article shows 8 really cool CSS selectors for progressive enhancment. Most of these involve variations of the attribute selector (which is not supported by IE6), but there are some very cool ways to decorate elements, especially links, with these techniques.

How To: Resizeable Background Image [CSS-Tricks] – Chris Coyier compares three ways to apply a resize-able background to an HTML element, the best one being a purely CSS solution that is really neat. A good read.

JavaScript

SocialHistory.js: See Which Sites Your Users Visit [RWW] – You may have seen scripts around this topic popping up lately, but Aza Raskin has pulled into a bit of JavaScript so you can include it on your site and provide a better user experience.

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