Today is my last day working at Tone Media. Over the last two years, I’ve learned so much that it would be challenging to put it all into a single blog post. The motivation to leave was driven by a lifestyle change, rather than a desire to find something ‘better’. So my parting is bitter sweet. Bitter because I’m leaving a group of exceedingly bright, creative, talented individuals that I’ve come to call my friends. Sweet because my new job at GFK presents new challenges and growth opportunities. Not to mention, the super awesome (and sweet) cake they got me!

The two biggest take aways from my time at Tone Media are these:

I never want to be the smartest programmer in the room

I know this may seem counter intuitive, and perhaps those with over sized egos will find it hard to understand; but there are tremendous benefits to working with developers that know things you do not. If you’re open minded and listen, you’ll learn first hand how to do new things, many times avoiding the common pitfalls that they might have spent hours dealing with. I would have even less hair on my head if it weren’t for the extremely talented developers I had around me everyday for the past two years.

And even with technologies you are familiar with, having other developers that have more experience allows you to see how they would tackle the same routine that you’ve so lovingly crafted a solution for. Sometimes that means re-factoring your code or being forced to see the problem from a different angle. Bitter medicine, but surely good if you are selfless enough to say I know nothing.

If you’re totally comfortable and confident in your daily work, you should be worried

In this fast paced world of technological breakthroughs, to tread water is to go the way of the dinosaurs. You should almost never feel totally at ease with the work you do. In fact in my experience, if you are a bit uneasy about the project or projects your working on, that’s good. It likely means you are extending yourself into an area where you have not been before. And the human mind (at least mine), doesn’t like that! But it’s the process of working though these feelings, and coming out the other side that hardens you and expands your skillset.

My time at Tone Media gifted to me both of these key scenarios every day and for that, I will be forever grateful. I know they will continue to do well, i wish them nothing but continued success in the coming years.

Welcome to my new site. I’ve been playing around with the idea of putting together a portfolio/blog for years, and I finally got around to it! Here, I’ll post about interesting finds and technology tid-bits that I encounter on the web.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into a situation where someone writes a post about the same rare issue I was having along with a solution. I hope to give back with this blog and help others just like me along the way.

I remember the first time I heard about firebug. That extension alone, was reason enough to use Firefox. Not only did it make it so much easier to develop front end designs faster, but no other tool, for me at least, taught me more about CSS.

Fast forward a few years, and someone introduced me to Chrome and it’s awesomely powerful built in developer tools. I only develop on Chrome now using the developer tools. When the project is done, then I check everything out on Firefox, Safari and unfortunately IE.

The more I use the tools, the more I learn. Head over to the documentation to learn the basics of how the tools work. But if you already know the basics, these are a few features that I find invaluable, which are not so obvious:

Accessing Selected DOM Nodes Though The Console

Just right click -> inspect element, and the highlighted node in the elements panel will be available in the console by accessing ‘$0‘. Where this really comes in handy is when you need to examine a node that doesn’t have an ID associated with it. And even if it does, it’s a more efficient syntax than traditional JavaScript.

As an example, let’s get the inner HTML of an element:

document.getElementById('myNode').innerHTML

Contrast that with accessing the currently selected node with Chrome:

$0.innerHTML

Log An Objects JavaScript Representation

Using the ubiquitous jQuery library, one can easily get a DOM node by running $(‘selectorName’). With Chrome, you can get a JavaScript representation of any node by using the dir() method.

dir(document.getElementById('myNode'))

Arrow Keys Work In The Elements Panel

I didn’t know about this one for a while. The up and down arrows allow you to change values on the fly in the CSS portion of the elements panel. I find this really useful for positioning CSS sprites right in the browser. It’s quicker than using an online sprite generation tool.

Are there any cool features that you find useful in this great tool? Leave a comment below and share!