Programming again

Posted by on October 30th, 2015  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

Well it’s been a year of only teaching two days a week. I had hoped that I would be a good painter by now. You would think that having 5 days a week to paint would have made a huge difference. I did do some nice work but my oils are still not ready for a gallery.

This week I decided to spend at least one of those days working on my back up plan: programming. I’m still going to paint a lot, but it’s time to brush up my skills in web development. In my classes  I’ve been using the textbook I wrote 3 years ago. It works great, but in the meantime web languages have continued to rocket forward and I need to catch up.

The latest, and biggest change to my corner of front end design is something called “display: flex;” There used to be display: none; – display: block; and display: inline-block;

What display: flex does is solve the problem of equal height columns as it pertains to interface design. I’ve been solving that problem with Photoshop background images and nested divs. For the columns I’ve been using the classic float property.

Flex makes that all go away. Now you can align elements in a similar fashion to how we used to do it with tables last century. With flex the divs stay where you put them, and they are fully responsive.

I can tell I’m going to have to re-write my book all over again. I am so not looking forward to that.

Part of the reason I’ve not been writing here in this 18 year old online journal is that I’ve been climbing a lot. It’s been a month since my vacation ended and I’m still climbing well. It’s been pouring rain, a lot, so I can see the writing on the wall that presages the end of climbing season. We will still get a few trips in, but it won’t be a regular thing. Winter can be a cool season though. I have lots of hobbies (music, art, ping pong) to develop, plus programming, and we may do some backcountry skiing.

I do love the sound of a hard rain on the roof. There is something very nice about that sound.