Karl's Blog

If you were hired to improve cars’ designs, with what aspect would you start? My first thoughts would be:

1. Performance
2. Fuel efficiency
3. Entertainment system?

I think I could go on for a while before I could even think about the car’s door. Recently I stumbled upon this video of an innovative way to design a car’s door. The majority of the cars use the same door’s design since 1897. Seriously, 1897! There might be some other systems out there, you could even consider lamborghini’s scissors doors, but they are insignificant compared with the amount of “normal” doors out there.

This interesting video made me think about how we innovate on the web. How many web “normal doors” are out there that we are forgetting to innovate? Sometimes you don’t know innovation is needed until you see it. Because after today I think all cars doors are lame and I want one of those!

I’ve been meditating on the definition of the word project, and how that applies on my work days. I’m getting to the conclusion that the english definition doesn’t fit the real word, at least not on the web development field.

Wordreference

Project – an enterprise carefully planned to achieve a particular aim

I disagree on that one, part of the project usually is to find the particular aim of that project :).

Wikipedia

A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.

Let’s take the carefully planned and change it to planned only, just to make it more compatible with the majority of the projects out there. I agree with the guys from 37 signals that planning is 100% guessing, and saying that you carefully guessed how long the project will take to be done is kind of nonsense.

The free online dictionary

An undertaking requiring concerted effort.

Ok, this is good, but it still lacks on some details.

My definition

First, let’s see what we can learn about the characteristics of the majority of projects.
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Last week I read an interesting post called Hiring Front-End Engineers, in this article Chris Zacharias talks about his experience on hiring Front-End Engineers for Youtube. Basically he’s saying how hard it is to find good professionals for this position. One of the reasons is that good Front-End developers must know JavaScript, not only jQuery.

Well, that made me think about what kind of skills should I focus on for my career. I would say that I’m a advanced JavaScript programmer, but I also can say that since I’ve been working with jQuery so much, I’m becoming an advanced jQuery programmer. And my question is: is that good or bad? (more…)

Yesterday I went to an event for web professionals in Madrid called First Tuesday, the main topic to be discussed was SEO. By the end they had 4 experts in SEO answering questions, and one question was raised: “How HTML5 will affect SEO?”. For my surprise silent took over the place, none of them wanted or knew how to answer this question.

After some seconds of awkward silence (more…)

Lately I’ve been creating and configuring google analytics profiles for CaravanToBuy and some other projects, and I noticed that I have 3 filters that are my default filters that I set on every new profile I create. So I decided to share them, maybe it will be useful to you too.

• 1. No traffic from your IP
• 2. All to lower case
• 3. No slashs in the end of your URLs (and no double slashes)

Let’s see how to set them on our profiles. (more…)

• How choice impairs your visitors – How excess in decision making can scare your users.
• Simultaneous Multiple-Browser JavaScript Testing With Yeti – Launching js tests from the command line, very useful.
• Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources – Smashing Magazine, always great posts…
• CaravanToBuy – After some months of work, the first public release of CaravanToBuy.

I woke up this morning, and as always the first thing that I did was to check my email. That’s when I knew I would have a great day. I just got an email from google informing that google apps will phase out support for IE6 and other old browsers. (more…)