August Mailbag Q & A

Last week I called for questions from you. I had received numerous questions via email, ranging in topic from MooTools to PHP to CSS to dogs, and I thought that posting them on the blog may be a better way to do things. Here were your questions and here are my answers.

How many hours do you work per week?

Good question. I do my best to keep myself at 40-50 hours at my employer's office. I work quite a bit on writing articles for my blog -- I'd ballpark it from 5 to 10 per week. There are weeks where I'm over 60 hours at Econoprint and that's when I really get down about work, but that hasn't happened in quite a while.

Besides work, what else do you like to do?

Everything! I love to play soccer (4 goals last game, but I don't like to brag), grill out with friends, have drinks with my girlfriend, and anything else that I can think of. I'll take a break from programming to play Grand Theft Auto 4 or watch a movie. I find that maintaining this blog puts a squeeze on reading time, but I try to sneak in a good book from time to time. Just finished reading Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva -- another good one!

When you work on a new website, do you use the help of a graphic designer or you do all the graphical work yourself, in addition to the coding? Is it you who design the templates of the sites you build?

I wish a designer's touch in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I simply don't have the ability to create "blank canvas" website designs. Here's how the process goes:

1. Salesperson pitches and sells a website to a client.
2. Our web designer creates the initial design proof and goes back and forth with the customer until the customer approves it.
3. Once the customer has approved the design, our designer gives me the Photoshop PSD.
4. Once I have the PSD, I chop apart the images I need and code the initial XHTML framework.

The most I do design-wise is tweak things and make suggestions.

What websites and/or other resources do you recommend for a beginner who wants to become a PHP/Javascript/CSS expert like you?

This is going to sound awful but I simply don't think books are a good place to start. The best way learn is to open your text editor and code. Code, code, code. Make mistakes, fix them, make more mistakes, fix them, and so on. That's what being a developer is.

As far as websites, it's hard for me to recommend any specific site (except mine, of course). When I need to learn something, I hit Google and do a search. Unfortunately, there's no central site to find everything. I do think that the following websites would benefit developers of all skillsets: AJAXian, A List Apart, CSS Tricks, Script & Style, NetTuts, PHP.net, and the official site of your chosen JavaScript framework.

What would you consider your dream job? Who would you want to work for?

My dream job would probably be at Digg or Facebook. Both companies are really progressive in their use of JavaScript libraries and CSS. Both treat their employees extremely well. Both target users in my age range so I feel as though I have a good base to work from. I'd love to meet talented and intelligent developers like myself, all working on one site, trying to make it better every day. Maybe I'll throw a resume at them one of these days.

What would it take for you to switch to jQuery?

As long as MooTools is still around and the project is active, a hell of a lot. I love MooTools and no amount of jQuery propaganda will change that. :)

Thank you for your questions! I'll hopefully be able to do this every few months.