I find work-related inspiration in many places, among others, colleagues meetups and conferences. But most inspiration comes while aimlessly roaming the internet. I’ve always been interested in more than writing the code for the software. Whether it be participating in meetings and discussions that would help me better understand the business. Gathering data to predict how a UI should be formed for optimal user experience. Learning how to avoid making poor software design decisions that would bring the nice people in operations in trouble. But also the softer things like how culture and circumstances affect us as developers and individuals.
It takes time to understand a problem, because before you can fully understand it, you need to also understand its context. As a code base grows, depending on how well the code is structured, the context in which you need to understand the problem can (and often will) grow.
When learning something new (in this case Laravel and it’s ORM Eloquent) it is always nice to be able to “look behind the curtains” to see what actually happens. This both helps you understand the internals of the things you are using and can sometimes make bug squashing a lot easier.
Around 5 years ago a colleague of mine tried to spark some interest for Clojure. He described it using terms like functional, higher order functions, pure functions, composable, immutable data, lazy evaluated, code is data and vice versa, macros, concurrency etc. None of which I truly understood at the time but instead felt like buzzwords.
For a long time I have wanted to find an alternative to Wordpress. It felt like an obstacle which needed overcoming every time I had an idea for a blog post. The result being that I didn’t get any posts published (I have a few drafts which I never finished).
I’ve just installed Gnome 3.6 (some packages might still be 3.5.9x) on my laptop by upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 beta2 together with the Gnome 3 PPA for a few missing things like the updated Nautilus.
I’ve transformed the example from my blog post yesterday to a jQuery plugin and pushed it GitHub. This removed some of the previous nessesary manuel added css. Also this opens up for adding different initialization options in the future.
