Software Engineering

I’ll do it once I get [insert awesome hardware/software here]!

In our age of rampant consumerism, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that you could only achieve great things only with the best equipment available.

There are two unfortunate side effects to this mentality:

People who can’t get those equipment are discouraged from even trying out that field, and
People who can get those equipment think they’re a lot better than they actually are.

But the reality is you don’t need to shell out tons of cash to be good at what you want to do. Ask any expert from any field, from the arts, to scientific fields, to sports, and they will all tell you one thing: focus on the basics.

Here’s what Freddie Wong (maker of famous After Effects heavy videos like Flower Warfare and Time Crisis) has to say about this:

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Programming Fonts

Courier New vs Consolas

Aside from revision control and coding standards, college students aren’t exposed to another important part of software development, namely, the significance behind the choice of programming font.

Okay, so the choice of font isn’t really that important. But it’s still worth considering when you take into account that you’re going to get noticeable benefits for such a small investment.

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My Talk on Ruby/Rails

Went to talk about Ruby and Ruby on Rails last Tuesday at the mini-DevCon at University of Perpetual Help System – DALTA. That’s the 4th public talk for this year (4.5th if you count the RailsFTW plugging last month).

No “transcript” here, though. Just imagine me giving the presentation in front of college students right after I make a class roster app in front of them in under 5 minutes, installation to demo. And yeah, Microsoft is the sponsor I was referring to in the talk.

Ruby on Rails on Prezi

RailsFTW v0.3 and mini-site now up

I hate design work.

Wait, that’s how I started my last blog post. =/

Anyway, I just came to post that I spent the past 10 hours building the mini-site for RailsFTW. There you could download the latest version of RailsFTW (v0.3) which contains the recently released Rails 3.0.3.

That site also contains lists of recommended links and downloads for people who want to use Ruby and Rails in Windows. If you have some suggestions, feel free to send them over to me.

Turn Links into Rounded Buttons via CSS3

I don’t like design work.

Whether I like it or not, I still have to do it since it’s part being a web developer. Fortunately, I get to learn a couple of tricks once in a while to make life a bit more interesting.

One of those is how to turn a boring link into a “Web 2.0” button:

link and button

Half a decade ago, you’d have to use an image for this effect. Thanks to the CSS3 support in modern browsers, you can implement this using only CSS. Here’s how you do it.

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