Just over a year ago I published a post about my experience learning a difficult piece of music, I Sleep At Waking by Ian Wilson, for solo saxophone, which has lots and lots of notes. Well, the good news is that I’ve made progress: I’ve memorized it and I can play it through, after a fashion. The bad news is obviously that it has taken a year, and also that I still haven’t mastered it. There comes a point with a piece when it becomes part of your mind and body, and it is yours – but I haven’t reached that stage yet. However, I’m developing a feel for it, and I love it more and more, despite its awkwardness. … read on »
Archive for August, 2009…
A Paradigmatic Project: Building a Flickr Gallery with PHP, jCarousel and Lytebox
Don’t re-invent the wheel. That’s a motto that every good programmer and web developer lives by. If we’re being creative or original it’s usually in knowing which components and scripts to combine, amongst all those that have been created by other people; and in knowing how each of those components can be tweaked and configured to produce a good solution.
In web development this amounts to a synergy of languages, APIs, engines and interfaces working in blissfully ignorant harmony to provide rich functionality. This is the beauty of web development in the age of its blooming youthfulness, following the awkward stumblings of its infancy.
Incidentally, I think this is the characteristic of this kind of work that conventional programmers, or software engineers … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson