msteigerwalt

On Coding Style

You can probably guess from the post frequency on my site that I’m not a fan of blogging. When I’m in developer mode, I’m more interested in creating nifty bits of code that conform to my artistic sensibilities and possibly have the side effect of making my work easier.

The same goes for releasing things. I’ve got completed, documented, portfolio- quality work just sitting around on my GitHub collecting dust. The bigger the project, the more work goes into the details of releasing it. I’ve never really been very interested in maintaining my geek cred, which means that when it comes to deciding when to give my projects their final nudge out the door, I usually opt for “tomorrow”.

The problem is compounded when taking into account the style of my work. Over the past few years, as I’ve gotten proficient enough at coding to develop romantic notions about what the perfect code should look like, I’ve tried a few different extremes.

Easy Footnotes with PHP

Maybe you read my site and think, “Gee, if only I had footnotes like Michelle, maybe I would be popular!” Perhaps you’ve tried to implement your own footnotes a few times, never to find an solution that felt right to you.

Maybe you resigned yourself to the fact that you’re not as awesome as me, and will never be able to have your own footnotes unless I personally walk you through every step of the process.

If so, I have great news. I can’t guarantee they’ll be as clever as my footnotes, but I can show you the technique I used for my article backend.

Ghetto Geolocation (Featuring Soft Porn!)

Update: This is an XSS security example. I wrote this way back in 2008, and even then it wasn’t exactly best practices.

Rob wanted geolocation without actually having to pay for it, so he asked me if there was a way to extract the user’s location from Adult Friend Finder’s ad banner script without allowing the banner to actually be displayed.

The ads are made of of nude (or practically nude) photos of women in the user’s local area who, the ad claims, are looking for casual sex. These pictures are definitely not work-safe.

Clearly, actually showing this banner would be a bad idea. We could hide it with CSS, but that’s riskier than never adding the HTML to our page at all.

Spam-Proof Email Links

Remember the good old days before the spambots, when a person could just use a mailto: link to post their email address and absolutely no ill effects would result?

The addresses weren’t even obfuscated. People would just click on the and, lo, a new mail message box would pop up, and you’d just type what you wanted to say and clicked ‘send’. Those were some good days.

We can bring back a little bit of that simpler time using MooTools and some advanced selector magic.

How to Recruit Me (and People Like Me)

Let’s say you manage to launch a smart, rapidly growing company. As your company blossoms, you find yourself in need of developers to fill your ranks and push out the next iterations of your product.

To start the process, you paste your job description into an email and fire it off to every match of a Monster search. Not only that, but you pick up your phone and personally call the lucky owners of the top twenty resumes. After conducting rigorous screening, you get a few people to come in for a face-to-face chat.

You find yourself a little bit disappointed during most of the interviews. However, you have to fill fifteen positions by the end of the month, which leaves you with few options. You hire the most promising ones and hope for the best.

Now, wouldn’t you feel silly if I told you you were completely ignoring a highly qualified and barely contested segment of the job market?