In this series, we will be creating a realistic scene inside your web browser. Our subject of interest is Man’s Best Friend. In order to achieve this we will model our dog using 3D modelling software. Introduction to Blender 3D Blender 3D is a free and open source software solution for modelling and animation. It…
“Resistance feeds on fear. We experience Resistance as fear” – The War of Art For months I have been procrastinating over a 3D side project that I wanted to do but was and still am frightened of. Why so scared? Well, I’m a web application developer, not an artist. I’m 35 years old, but have…
I’m sure that you’ve heard the old saying “time is money” plenty of times before. Work out your hourly rate and do the conversion. I would like to recommend taking this concept on stage further. Most of us fall into one of two categories: 1. Cash poor and time rich – this may be because…
My company’s websites are not fully optimized (although not nearly as bad as some of our competitors!). I decided to invest some time into diving deeper into the art of performance optimization with two courses: Tracking Real World Web Performance by Nik Molnar I didn’t expect too much from this because I’d already seen the…
Just published on Outlier Developer, I describe Four Aspiring Outlier Mistakes To Avoid, which I am personally guilty of and hope that I can prevent others from making. None of the mistakes made above were due to laziness. There were all due to misprioritization. With hindsight all of these things look dumb, but while we…
One of my fellow guest bloggers on OutlierDeveloper.com, Andrea Angela, has a great article explaining the importance of Active Learning over Passive Learning. I would like to take you through a worked example of how you could apply this principle to achieve much better results. Let’s suppose you are interested in learning Angular JS but…
It kicked off a little bit on Twitter earlier today over readability and clean code following the article Why Destructuring Is A Terrible Idea. Essentially it comes down to semantics. What exactly is Clean Code? What is readable code? The most famous book on the subject is the one by Robert Martin, where he presents…
Always scrutinize yourself. Even if the project went really well, ask “What could I have done differently? What would I do differently I was to do it again now?”. “This system of self-analysis, self education, continued year after year, did more for me than any other one thing I have ever attempted ” – How…
I don’t want this post to sound like an advert for playing poker, especially high stakes poker, but I have found that many of the disciplines learned by playing poker to win can set you apart as a professional programmer. I would like to teach you those disciplines here. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker, a completely…
As part of my research into Work Life Balance I have been reading John Sonmez’s book Soft Skills, which is an excellent book overall. John is a big fan of the Pomodoro Technique for maximizing productivity and does 50-55 pomodori per week. While I can see that there are several advantages to using the technique,…
Zombie Code Kill 