There is a grand adventure to be embarked upon every time a student asks a question and the mentor says: “I don’t know, let’s find out.” The chance to learn occurs at the moment of uncertainty by forcing the knowledge seeker to step out of their comfort zone and expose ignorance. Own ignorance. Keep uncovering new uncertainties to investigate.
With regard to convention and standards, become proficient enough with your tools to recognize the value that is being added by following them. Promptly try to break the rules to see what happens. Find out why you are told to do things a certain way, then figure out how to do it better.
Respect elders and tradition while at the same time questioning authority, institutions, and customary manners of doing things. Wise elders when questioned thusly will recognize the positive value of reinforcing fundamentals and the chance however small of learning something completely new. The greatest scientific breakthroughs have been made from examining established beliefs and taking an alternate tack.
Break down the pillars of beliefs to atomic constituents. Build them back up by carefully considering each addition, being ruthless in the inquisition of your tenets. Hold no belief so fanatically that contravening evidence is ignored. Be fluid in ways.
Finally, recognize the struggles that others have around you. Help them. You will probably learn something in the process. Voraciously consume resources and be mindful to give credit. Strive to be a good citizen steward of code and contribute to open source software projects. Give and receive feedback as a gift. Be grateful to be able to see this episode of history from your particular unique vantage point.
Remember to be human, and to step out of your skin sometimes.
As a fun little project I started playing around with Firebase and this Jekyll blog. In a move I hope to not live to regret, I made it possible to submit comments!
Update (December 2016): Retired (aka nuked) the code shown in this tutorial from my blog. As much fun as it was to over-engineering a comments section in Jekyll, it’s time to retire the seldomn used (if ever) comments section. Incidentally, the tutorial led me to learn how to use Google’s reCAPTCHA and Liquid templating which was fun.
Lastly, due to Google’s aquisition of Firebase shortly after this post was published, I was able to painlessly transfer the database from the legacy servers to the shiny new Material Design interface at Firebase Console
Folks who have pertinent and kind comments can scroll to the bottom of a post and enter a name, message, and an optional email for a Gravatar image.
Isn’t that nice?
I used part 3 of an article from CSS-Tricks1, so if you’re curious, go ahead and follow those directions. The only tricky part was configuring the security rules.
If I get hit with lots of spam, I will need to take corrective steps, but for now the only validation that is done is checking for the presence of a name and a message.
Firebase is really cool, fast and well documented. I am loving the realtime NoSQL cloud database which stores data as familiar JSON objects. For a simple blog it does seem to be a bit overkill, but I just love to over-engineer this lil’ blog to bits.
Got feedback? Leave a comment, bub. Or, you know, just reach out to my email.
The mobile experience for this page is responsive via relative sizing, images (such as they are) and media queries, but from Safari on iOS there was a distinct lack of snappiness in scrolling leading to a stagnant feeling. We must bring back the bounce!
‘Inertial’ or momentum scrolling is easily enabled with the CSS property -webkit-overflow-scrolling.1
Thanks to an article from CSS Tricks2, this was a simple matter of adding two lines to the body selector.
overflow-y:scroll;/* has to be scroll, not auto */-webkit-overflow-scrolling:touch;
Page scrolling from mobile, that is to say, from iOS WebKit, now has the familiar bounciness. Cross-browser behavior at least from the point of view of device mode in Chrome Dev Tools seems to be looking A-OK as well.