Staying Strong
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Part of being an engineer (especially in San Francisco) is getting recruiter emails. Most of the time, they are awful.
Recently, I received an email from the CEO of a company that I'm a big fan of. He wanted me to join his company. After interviewing and thinking about it a lot, I accepted the offer. The whole time I kept thinking that I could keep working on Cheddar on the side and if it took off, I could quit and work on it full time. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that that was more exciting than working at this really cool company.
After much deliberation, I told them I had changed my mind and was going to continue working on stuff at Nothing Magical (my stuff) full time. They were disappointed, but respected the decision. This was a super hard decision, but I think it's the right thing.
Learn iOS
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Lots of people ask where to begin learning iOS. This book is hands down the best place to get started. I learned Objective-C from Mac version of this book.
It's fantastic. Aaron does an amazing job explaining how everything works. You should order this book and get started. It's easier than you think.
Dealing with Emoji
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Someone recently pointed out that Cheddar doesn't support Emoji that well. After lots of banging my head against the wall, I figured out some simple solutions. Here's what I learned.
Note: currently only Safari support emoji so the examples might be a bit confusing if you're using a browser that doesn't support emoji.
Cheddar's server uses Ruby on Rails. It turns out that there is a bug in ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding that doesn't encode high UTF-8/UTF-16 characters correctly. (More information on this bug). There's a simple solution that monkey patches ActiveSupport to use the actual character instead of trying to encode it.
Using People
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The number of people that talk to me only when they want something is decently high. This bothers me a lot. If the only time you talk to me is to ask a programming question, to ask if I know some you can hire me to make something for you, or to ask me to fix your iPhone, it's kind of a slap in the face.
I don't mind doing any of those things for friends. If we haven't talked in 5 years and message me on Facebook with 2 sentences asking me to solve your problem, don't expect a positive reply.
My Grid System
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There's a lot of people using responsive CSS grid systems these days. Twitter's Bootstrap and Nathan Smith's 960 Grid System are two really popular ones.
I've never really been a fan of grid systems. Having tons of divs with classes that correspond to layout all over the place just feels wrong and makes your code look ugly. Anyway, I have a really basic way of doing things that I guess is technically a grid system, but I don't like to think of it like that.
Here's the basic layout: