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Album Reviews: Crystal Castles, The Birthday Massacre, Depeche Mode, David Bowie

Here’s something I don’t usually do. I’m going to review some of the interesting albums that came out this year and what I think of them, like anyone here cares. But at any rate, here you are.

Crystal Castles: III
Back in 10th grade, I went through a short-lived nihilist phase. I’m not sure if it was inspired by The Big Lebowski and my desire to pass out in a swimming pool, carry swords and marmots around, and put out electronic records, but it looks like it inspired Canadian Duo Crystal Castles to do the latter. The album’s concept can be best described as nihilistic. The band has always been about creating hard-to-listen, lo-fi punktronica, but they’ve slowly been moving away from their roots and into the realm of throwaway dance music. Which, admittedly, is something that nihilists would do.

Let me just be frank… this album sucks. It starts off well enough with Plague, which is a pretty decent song, but then it drops off entirely from there. From here on it’s mostly generic club music, with an annoying volume ducking effect on nearly every track that will make you think your speakers are busted. It was an incredibly stupid decision for them to make, and especially makes me angry that a band that used to be good at being lo-fi would stoop to insane levels of over-production. With the post-production effects removed, the album might even be decent. Insulin is a more experimental song that will remind you of their first album, but it only lasts a minute or so, and then it gets back to more dance floor junk. Then they wind down the usual way with Child I Will Hurt You, with a song that isn’t too bad, but isn’t enough to save the album.
Score: 1/5

The Birthday Massacre: Hide and Seek
Also hailing from Canada, the land of hit-or-miss artists, comes synth-rock band The Birthday Massacre’s new album. I’ve been a huge fan of TBM since 2006, so I’ll try to keep this review as unbiased as possible.
This album is a significant departure from their usual style, but not by much. The basic formula is still there… mostly cinematic 1980s style progression mixed with occasional angry industrial rock tracks. The album starts with Leaving Tonight, which is a beautiful song that I instantly fell in love with; it really hits you over the head with what this band is about: haunting vocals, keytar solos, magic synthesizers, and dark subject matter. Next, the angry track this time is Down, which is by far the most angry song they’ve ever made, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best. After that, it’s hit or miss, which kinda breaks my heart to admit. However, the middle tracks Alibis and One Promise start to pick things up. From there, things start winding down again, but perhaps not as prematurely. Overall, it’s still a good album, but the more computerized, dancy feel they’ve given this album seems like it’s holding itself back from being a lot better. I’m hoping I can learn to appreciate some of these songs more as time passes, and I hope they can get a different producer than Kevvy Mental… I’m not really sure he “gets” what they’re supposed to be about.
Score: 3.5/5

Depeche Mode: Delta Machine
I’ve been a Depeche Mode fan for the longest time, even though every album they’ve ever put out is the same story… a couple of amazing songs, and then the rest is filler. This is no different.
It starts off pretty amazing. The first three tracks: Welcome to my World, Angel, and Heaven are all spectacular… and then I forget the rest. But even for those first songs, it’s at least worth a listen; at least they make it easy to skip over the rest.
Score: 2.5/5

David Bowie: The Next Day
Bowie’s first album in 10 years is great. I’ve never been a huge Bowie fan, but I definitely have a respect for him. That said, I’m happy with the album but it’s still not really my thing. “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” gets a respectable place on my car MP3 player, until I get bored of it. But hey, that’s something.
Score: 3/5

Skinny Puppy: Weapon
Skinny Puppy (Canadian band again), is another one of those bands that have been around forever but isn’t my favorite band, either. This album was a departure from their ohGr-esque rapping and back to their 80s industrial roots, a genre they played a huge part in inventing. Now, I like ohGr, and I loved their last album (which oddly enough sounded more like a Skinny Puppy album), and this album is definitely interesting. Wornin’ is definitely my style, but from there it gets incredibly repetitive, but their music has traditionally been that way. I like it for what it is, a sort-of throwback with modern production (they even have a great cover of their old song, Solvent), but it ain’t The Process either. And I don’t care what you say, that was the best album they ever did, and one of my favorite albums of all time.
Score: 3/5

Front Line Assembly: Echogenetic
Another band from Canada, eh? FLA is always a fascinating band. Their sound is always evolving, and always trying modern electronic techniques to see what sticks. Their 80s music sounded like what you think it would. In the 90s it was guitar-driven heavy metal. In the aughts it was IDM and drum n’ bass. And now… well… dubstep.
Now I’ve dropped that (bass-filled) bombshell, it’s still respectable industrial. I mean, if you want to get down to it, them and other bands like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher basically invented most of what dubstep is, a decade before it got labeled that way. So what you end up getting is a nice mix of what makes FLA cool, plus a little of what’s cool about dubstep (you know, the glitchiness and bass-dropping) without the Skrillexy high-pitched moans, rapping, and the screaming demand to call 911 at any given time. So it’s not as bad as you think, but I still like Artificial Soldier better.
Score: 3/5

Fantasy Healthcare

I have an announcement to make: I placed 3rd in the Robert Wood Johnson foundation’s Games to Generate Data Challenge. I have been secretly working on this project for most of the year, and now that it’s over, I can talk about what I’ve been building.

Fantasy Healthcare is a game that allows friends (in the Wisconsin area for this version) to create their own healthcare provider dream team and pit it against other friends and players online. The provider data and provider names are 100% real, but the doctor/department names have been changed to protect the innocent. The idea is that players will better familiarize themselves with providers in the area, while also learning which providers perform best in certain areas.

The interesting part of all this is how it all got started. At my public sector job, I joined up with a group that was looking to enter the Games to Generate Data Challenge as a team, but alas, government red tape (and lawyers) prevented this from happening. However, since I was a contractor, I was able to take an idea of my own into the challenge and see how far it would get. It ended up being a good enough idea to place in the Top 5, so from there I developed the game on my own.

Fantasy Healthcare is written in HTML5, Canvas, CSS3, Javascript, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, PHP, and MySQL. The back end stuff runs on a Linux server. The Canvas stuff is also cross-compiled to native iOS and Android platforms for the efficiency and fast performance you expect from a game. I did it all myself, so considering I competed with some large teams and some big industry players, I guess I did pretty well for 3rd place.

So besides winning some nice prizes, I also got a trip to Boston to attend Games for Health, and a trip to the Health 2.0 Conference in San Jose to see the winner announcements. First off, Ben Sawyer’s Games for Health project in Boston was a wonderful experience, and I wish I were able to go again. There are really some amazing interactive ideas out there ready to transform the industry. As far as Health 2.0, I also had a great time hanging out in the Valley, drinking local brews and eating some In-N-Out Burger. The 1st and 2nd Place winners were totally deserving of their prizes, each having some fun-looking and interesting games, and I sincerely wish them all the best with their endeavors.

While I was in San Jose I got caught up in the government shutdown, but that’s a story for another time.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Health 2.0 are doing some wonderful things right now to provoke and promote bleeding edge ideas in the healthcare industry, so be sure to visit their challenge site.

What’s next for Fantasy Healthcare? I’d like to publish the apps and expand it to more cities. This will take some time I don’t have at the moment, though. In the meantime, it is available here for anyone to play with.

Mobile vs. PC, Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Let’s get real for a few minutes.

Believe it or not, PCs serve an important purpose: to get important stuff done. Think of it like semis vs. cars. One one end, you have something that gets you from A to B. On the other end, you have a hulking machine built to haul 10 tons or more. They’re huge, ugly, and burn energy, but they do what a car simply won’t do in its form factor. As much as I would love to have a PC that fit in my pocket, the reality is this won’t be happening for a very long time.

I built my desktop to be a stuff-doing station. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8-core 64-bit processor, a video card that cost an embarrassing amount of money, and banks upon banks of peripherals. Shrinking down this computer anytime soon would be impossible. I mean, the video card alone is probably the size of around 15 iPhones. Multi-terabyte drives are the size of 3 iPhones. Running on ARM could probably shrink down the other internals, but we’ve already got a huge problem for real-world work if we can’t manage to shrink down storage and video cards at a decent price.

What do we need that stuff for? Well, let’s look at the PC audience. Gamers, they need those video cards, maybe even 2 or 3 of them. Video editors, they’ll need a good video card as well, plus RAM and serious HDD space, not to mention speed. 3D artists will need a rendering farm (the cloud won’t do), specialty video cards, and loads of RAM. Graphic designers mostly need adequate screens, but they also need adequate processing and human interfaces. Businesses simply need adequate interfaces and access to Office. Engineers and scientists also need adequate interface and processing power. Desktop computers are massive, hot, and loud, because, well, they’re doing some pretty hardcore stuff. The wonderful thing about the mobile revolution is we no longer need to use them for basic tasks like web surfing and social media, but there are people in this world that need them to do their jobs.

So where do I see things in a few years? I think we’ll still see both devices, and I think we’ll finally see real docking stations, but I don’t think we’ll see actual tablets or smartphones being used as PC replacements. This might possibly work in the business world (and it would be kinda cool and probably seal the deal for BYOD), but smartphones still have a ways to go before you can use them for other purposes. Eventually things will miniaturize, but who knows if they’ll catch up to the raw power, customization, and upgradability of a desktop. We really need a way to dock our devices together in a synergistic (I hate that word, sorry) fashion to share data efficiently, but it seems like a lesson in futility at this point to try and replace the desktop completely, especially if your peripherals will be taking up lots of space anyway. I mean, a tablet won’t be replacing your mouse and keyboard in production (if you disagree, you’ve never designed or developed anything in your life). A tablet won’t replace your dual monitor setup, or your RAID, your subwoofer, etc. so what’s the big deal about having a box to better process your serious work? Desktops aren’t just a box, they’re a human interface and peripheral setup that has stayed consistent for decades for good reason.

So I touched on modularity being absent on smartphones, so let’s talk about the recent social media interest in the Phoneblok concept. I think we’ve all had this idea at some point in time, and it really is a great idea. Obviously there are some engineering challenges with what they portray, but that’s not to say it’s impossible to do. If good ideas were easy to engineer, we’d run out of good ideas. That said, some of this concept is pretty silly. Some thoughts of mine.

– There’s no shame in merging similar functionality. Wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC should probably be merged into one block. I mean seriously, when was the last time your Bluetooth broke on your phone? Heck, when was the last time you used Bluetooth?
– The block and pin idea would probably be flaky. They should have gone a different direction, like PCI card slots… rails and a pinout on the end. This would make engineering much simpler and avoid having the phone burst into 10 pieces if you drop it.
– Simplify. Instead of trying to modularize everything, just have slots for where things will go. Have everything held together by a battery on top, then have 1 CPU slot, 1 big card slot, and 4 small slots. That way you don’t have to tear your hair out second-guessing the user’s configuration. A battery and a CPU have no hardware interface commonalities.
– Don’t pretend this is greener. In all honesty, the Phonebloks idea might actually increase waste, and it will certainly up the manufacturing costs.
– In the real world, most of these things are crammed into a single board or chip. This is how they are able to make the devices so cheap and fast. Separating everything out means a headache for the manufacturers of these chips, and the engineers that have to deal with the interfacing.

I’m willing to bet someone will eventually try to tackle this problem, but it won’t be something from Kickstarter. Just my two cents.

Take Care of Your Phone

Image of MyTouch 4G

It plays Angry Birds. That’s all that was important in 2010.

This phone is three years old. Don’t believe me? Let me tell you about this phone.
I got it in Christmas 2010. I had decided not to buy a smartphone until 4G rolled out, and this turned out to be an excellent decision. This phone was the absolute top of the line back then– Android 2.2 (later upgraded to 2.3.4), 1 Ghz single core, MyTouch 4G (made by HTC). It is starting to show its age, hardware and software wise, but physically it looks brand new.

What’s my secret? First off, let me tell you what I didn’t do. I have never once used a screen protector on this phone. I have never used a bumper case of any kind. I’ve carried this phone in my pocket every single day for 3 years, and there’s barely a scratch on it, and the screen is perfect. All I did was follow common-sense notions of how to treat a smartphone, basically. Stuff like, I dunno… don’t put it in the same pocket as your keys; don’t put it in your back pocket; hold onto it firmly at all times; keep out of reach of pets and children. Do these things, and you will not need any extra crap tacked on to your stock phone. Treat it for what it is, a $500+ fragile box of awesome, and it will treat you well in return.

All that said, I really need to upgrade to something new. At this point in time I’m considering a Moto X, a Galaxy S4, a Galaxy Note, or an iPhone 5C. But if I wait until the holidays, I could probably Get a Galaxy S5 by then (64 bit, I bet). Basically I want something with a massive screen, newest Android, and excellent processing power.

So I was kidding about the iPhone, of course.

Thumbprints are not Passwords

After every Apple keynote, you can always expect to read the same type of sensationalist article. You know, the “Is this the end of _______ as we know it?” Well, iPads didn’t kill PCs, Siri didn’t kill Google search, and thumbprint scanners will NOT kill passwords.

See, biometrics aren’t really in the same vein as passwords; they’re really more of a supplement, or a verification of a person’s prescence, like a PIN number or SMART card. They’re not trying to be passwords, they’re something else entirely. They’re just trying to make life difficult enough for people who aren’t you, or at least difficult enough without a specialized computer. Even a 6 digit PIN only has 1,000,000 combinations, which would take a computer seconds to brute force, but that’s beside the point.

The point I’m going to make is that biometrics have similar flaws that don’t make it suitable as a password replacement. In all fairness, replacing a PIN number is really all Apple is trying to accomplish at this point, and I think that’s great, so it’s the media that has it all wrong.

So what’s wrong with thumbprints compared to passwords? Just off the top of my head…

  • Thumbprints cannot be changed, revoked, or reset. If someone knows your thumbprint hash, you’re out of luck, forever. If you are concerned about the NSA, this should terrify you.
  • You are limited to 10 thumbprints. And even then, you’re not going to remember which finger you used for what website.
  • They technically aren’t replacing a password, A thumbprint is read as a hash and stored as a shadow password. It will especially work this way for websites.
  • The thumbprint reader and software introduces failure points. A hacker could take control of these systems and force a certain hash without scanning a thumb. A man in the middle could read the hardware interaction and simulate it later.
  • Thumbprints aren’t secret. You leave traces of your fingerprints on everything. Especially mobile devices.
  • Technology exists to “lift”, analyze, and reproduce said fingerprints, and it will only improve with demand.
  • Some people have stubborn fingerprints. Me, for instance. When I worked for the University, we went through several thumb and handprint timeclocks the professors had to use. Those machines hated me. One of them would routinely make me scan 8-10 times before it would get a match, while it worked fine for everyone else. I think it had to do with my hands always sweating.
  • They add a failure point for the device. As someone who has owned several scanners through the years… these things break. On a PC it’s not a big deal, you can run out any buy the same brand thumbprint scanner, but what happens when it breaks on your iPhone? You buy a new phone, and you don’t get your data back.
  • You can’t let a trusted party use your thumbprint when you’re away.
  • You can damage your thumbprint. What if you burn your thumb while cooking dinner? You could be locked out of your computer for weeks, or in some cases, permanently.
  • There hasn’t been much study on this, but thumbprints could be prone to hash collisions, especially if you are forced to scan a “backup finger”. Different biometric technologies, or course, will vary greatly.
  • Your actual thumb could get stolen. Don’t laugh, it has happened. Some thieves are willing to cut off your thumb if it will give them complete, unrevokable access to your entire life.
  • Biometric hardware does not give standard readings, so you’re at the mercy of a third party to maintain access to your accounts. If you replace one piece of hardware with another brand, it will probably not give the right hash.

Passwords, of course, have problems of their own, but they are still the most secure and sensible way to protect your data. Even something easy to remember like “iLikeBag3lsAndCr3amcheese_” is incredibly secure for years to come. The thing is, security is up to you. Your password should be long. It should have caps, numbers, and special characters. You should not use the same password twice. It should not be obvious, and you should not write it down. Follow these rules and you have very little to worry about, besides forgetting it.

What’s the right way to go about authentication? I dunno, I’m not a security expert. I would say multi-factor authentication is always best, so maybe a password-protected SMART cart would be the best way.

Icon Fonts: The Vast Wingding Conspiracy

Icon FontsThe latest trend in web design is to use fonts to do render glyphs, in place of the img tag and the still-elusive SVG. I’m sort of on the fence about this, although I recognize there are definitely some good reasons to do this. Instead of blathering on about theory, let’s go to the chalkboard, shall we?

Positives:

  1. Less messing with Photoshop and/or sprite sheets
  2. Load images faster
  3. Advantages of infinite scaling
  4. Advantages of CSS (shadows, hover, etc.)

Negatives:

  1. Limited to the glyphs in the font
  2. Limited to font limitations (no color, no texture, etc.)
  3. Bad semantics
  4. Potential for bad 508
  5. Potential for bad SEO
  6. More verbose than img tag
  7. Potential to cause your site to suffer “Wingding Syndrome”
  8. Necessary to load an external font, including hundreds of icons you won’t be using
  9. @font-face, and the baggage that comes with it

Hmm. You know, I was actually meaning for this article to sing the praises of icon fonts, but I’ve suddenly changed my mind. Instead, we’re going to have a fair and balanced look at the above. So without further ado, let’s pit the two technologies against each other…

Logistics
The less dealing with Photoshop for icons, the better, right? Well don’t forget that you’ll also have to deal with font creation software instead (gross) unless you want to use stock images for your icons. That’s fine, except we went down this route in the ’90s with Wingdings 1-3. I still have nightmares to this day.
Also, don’t forget you will need to store and serve several copies of the font. The IE version, FF version, Chrome version, mobile version etc.
Winner: images

Browser and Loading Time
In theory, vectors will load faster than a sprite sheet, right? Here’s the thing. A font is a giant sprite sheet already… well, a vector sheet, but a sheet nonetheless. You might have a 20k PNG representing your icons, but you might have a 60k font representing tons of glyphs, 90% of which you will never use. But let’s say the font is smaller. So it’ll load faster, right? No. Custom fonts can take a few seconds to install, etc. before being applied to the website. In the meantime, you’ll have random letters sitting around you page while it waits for the browser to do its thing. Is it worth it?
Winner: images

FX Advantages
What has always sucked about CSS is the lack of support for image effects. You cannot add drop shadows and change colors (at least, not in the way you’d expect). With glyph fonts, now you can. So I’ll concede to fonts for this, but the question I want to leave you all with is… why do you need to be able to have hover effects and shadows on your glyphs?
Winner: fonts

Scaling
This is another brilliant argument for font glyphs. Img tags are bitmap only at this point, and adding retina resolution is a huge pain and there is no best way to do it.
Winner: fonts

Semantics
You need to add an icon to your page, which is more semantic: <img src=”email.png” alt=”Email:”> or <span aria-hidden=”true”>&#x25a8;</span> ? Yeah. And what do you do about those with visual impairment?
Winner: images

SEO
How do you think Google feels when it has trouble reading your website? You know that friend of yours that uses Outlook and the smiley faces turn into letters in your email client? J
I know you can use “content:” in CSS, but that’s not going to save you from Google, and “content:” is something you should always strive to avoid using. And it may not be happening now, but eventually black-hat SEO companies could start using ROT-13 rotated fonts to hide stuff they don’t want Google to necessarily see. I don’t think they’re doing it now, but there’s that possibility they’ll spoil the fun.
Winner: images

This reminds me of when we were using Flash and Javascript to render custom fonts 6 years ago. It’s overkill. Wait for SVG, and in the meantime, just deal with bitmaps unless you have really good reason to use this method.

In closing…
Don’t. Just don’t. Unless you plan to build an obnoxious website with tons of glyphs all over it.
Which you shouldn’t.

The New Way to do Event Bubbling

All Javascript developers should be familiar with event bubbling. For those of you who don’t know, event bubbling is when DOM events move up the chain from bottom to top. In other words, if you click on a <li>, the <body> will get clicked first, then the <ul>, then the <li>. In IE, of course, it does the exact opposite (“event capturing”), but with the advent of jQuery, this is pretty much a moot point.

So why is it important to know? Well, imagine you’ve attached a click event to an <li>. It may not be a problem now, but if your <ul> ends up with thousands of <li>s, you’ve got thousands of bindings in the DOM, which is going to be a performance killer among other things. Instead, simply attach the click event to the <ul>, then inside the event, figure out what <li> got clicked on and react accordingly.

By the way, this is an interview question for every Javascript-related job ever. Know what it is and why it’s important.

I was going to post a simple example on how to do this, but apparently this is entirely the point of jQuery’s new “on” method. I use “on” all the time, and you should too, and if you are still using “delegate” or the dreaded “live” to bind events dynamically, you should start using “on” instead. So anyway, here is how to use “on” to efficiently bubble events:

$('ul').on('click','li', function(evt){
alert("cream cheese");
});

What this code is doing is binding to the <ul>, but only firing the callback if a child <li> node was targeted. I’ve always used $(document).on as a force of habit, but really you should be using the parent of the object you want to bind to. Folks, it doesn’t get any simpler than this. Sure wish I understood this months ago….

Project Workflow for Lone Developers

I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a designer-developer hybrid. I worked as a graphic and web designer for several years. I did back end development professionally for 4 years. I’ve done UX development professionally for 3 years. I love design and I love coding, and I love doing both at the same time. So it’s not uncommon for me to build entire web applications by myself. This practice gets a bad rap because developers are typically awful designers, and vice-versa, but for me it comes naturally.

I’ve been designing since age 6 and programming since age 11, and never quite knew how I could merge those talents. Since kindergarten, everyone always told me I would grow up to be an artist, but I wanted to be a programmer. Once the time came when I needed to choose a major, I chickened out at the last minute and chose multimedia (I hated math and still do). Back in 2001, CD-ROMs and VB were king, and Director and Flash were still in their heyday. That was how you built interactive applications. But slowly, web and mobile took over this space, and bridged the gap between design and development. I was lucky to be caught in the middle of that merge.

Throughout the years, I’ve typically been unmanaged throughout the web development process, since the stuff I do is usually highly experimental. Because of this, I’ve developed and refined my own process for development that seems to work great for me. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found this workflow to be the winning combination, especially for projects where I’m going it solo.

Lone Developer Workflow

  1. “Liveframing”, what I call wireframing with HTML. Create a preliminary GUI with no design, just basic structure. I prefer this to wireframing in most cases… honestly, I’ve never been a fan of wireframing tools, and I avoid them whenever possible. It depends on the project though.
  2. Mockup. Based on your liveframe, use Photoshop to design what the final website will look like. You want to throw a bone to the client to keep them busy awhile, but you also want to put a vision in your head of what you’re working towards.
  3. Database schema. This is the third thing I usually do, for two reasons. One, after building the GUI I have a pretty good idea of what data I’m collecting and how it will be used, and second, I want to do this before starting on the back end. I usually use Excel or pen and paper to draft a schema, and then build the actual tables as I need them. The schema will always change from start to finish, but usually I nail it with 90% accuracy. And usually, I end up needing fewer tables than I had originally schemed.
  4. Back end development. Once I have a barebones liveframe and a schema, I’m ready to start back end development. Of course I start in the planning stages, figuring out which pages do what, how the API will work, .htaccess considerations, etc. and generally decide how communications will be coded. Communication formats will also be decided in this stage (XML vs JSON, data structure, REST considerations, etc.). Then, I start coding, and hook the liveframe up to the code as I go for testing purposes.
  5. UX development. I start elaborating on the liveframe by adding the necessary Javascript and jQuery.
  6. Test, test, test. As I move through my prototype on the front and back, I add or modify decisions for both sides. The pieces slowly come together. The client should be engaged during this time to verify the project is functioning under the proper requirements.
  7. Once the project is 90% solid, then I start slicing the front end. The liveframe’s header, footer, and CSS will be replaced with the new design, and if you did it right, it should pop right in.
  8. Beta and QA testing. This is probably something you don’t want to do yourself. Find friends willing to test it out.

Behold, and Impart My Learned Wisdom Unto Others

Bartek’s Law of Coworking
Nothing says the digital era like piling people into a downtown office building with tons of talent and zero ideas.

Bartek’s Law of Private Sector Employment
Make the boss love you. Make management respect you. Make HR fear you.

Bartek’s Law of Project Management
“Man, it’s really hard to find developers. Let’s add more esoteric technologies to the stack and hopefully that’ll make hiring easier.”

Bartek’s Law of User Experience
“The client called. They’re worried that by simplifying the design, you’re confusing the user.”

Bartek’s Law of Software Engineering
The only career path where more money gets you fewer of the opposite sex.

Bartek’s Law of Google Image Search
No matter what the search term, you will always end up with furries in the results. Once you see the first one, you’ve reached the end of relevance.

Bartek’s Law of Design
Apple sets all trends, because that’s what your boss and clients want. If that means ushering in the return of early ’90s hypercolor, then so be it.

Bartek’s Law of Web Design
Take any random picture, blow it up and add 1000% gaussian blur. Add some aquamarine and coral buttons. Congratulations, you made a website.

Bartek’s Law of IT Jobs
Everbank has had those jobs posted for 4 years now. Ignore those, they have no clue who they want to hire.

Bartek’s Law of Front End Job Hunting
The search term you’re looking for is not “frontend”; it’s not “front-end” either. The standard search term is “ninja“.

Bartek’s Law of Modern Web Development
Yo dawg, I heard you like having to learn 5 languages. So we put languages on top of those languages.

Bartek’s Law of IT Careers
You can live where there are awesome jobs. You can live where life is relaxed and easy. But you can’t live in both at the same time.

Bartek’s Law of Search
If you’re searching the web and can’t figure out why Google is giving you unusually awful results… you’re accidentally using Bing again.

Bartek’s Law of Photoshop
“Client: My 11 year-old nephew knows Photoshop. I’ll have him design the website to save money.”

Bartek’s Law of Art School
Congratulations, you graduated. Hang that piece of paper on the wall and commence to starving.

Every year, it goes something like this…

CEO: I just read in Forbes that…

2013: …all websites should be written in Scala. Let’s rewrite our Java to Scala, by next week.
2012: …relational databases are dead. Let’s migrate 30 years of data to MongoDB, they’ll be around forever.
2011: …all websites should use responsive design. Make it pop.
2010: …all websites use Ruby now. Let’s hire Rails experts; there should be tons of them, and willing to work cheap.
2009: …millennials only buy through social media. Let’s make a Tweeter, whatever that is.
2008: …SEO is the future. Let’s buy tons of backlinks, spam up blogs, and set up microsites. No way this plan will fail.
2007: …all websites should be web 2.0. Let’s market ours as web 3.0!!
2006: …all websites should use Flex. Let’s rewrite our entire website in Flex, but don’t use any Flash.
2005: …all websites should have a blog. What, you mean we have to pay someone to write articles for it?
2004: …all websites need an RSS feed. Content? What’s that?
2003: …IE won the browser wars, and no other browser will ever compete. Let’s only write for IE now.
2002: …ASP.NET is going to revolutionize the industry. This is how all web applications should be developed.
2001: …we need a Flash landing page to sell customers on our branding. Make it so.
2000: …e-commerce is the future. Let’s sell pet food online and advertise at the Super Bowl, this is going to be HUGE.