New Things

Having been at my new job for three weeks, I feel marginally pleased with what I have learned so far. Especially considering the wonderful gift of a cold that’s been going around the fourth floor of the office, it’s been surprising and exciting that I’ve learned as much as I have in such a short time. Just to name a few:

Github
Github has always been a scary place to me. I’ve used it in past to download plugins and occasionally to read through documentation (or rather, pretend I know what I’m doing). I’d always been confused by what ‘clone in desktop’ meant, whatever all of those 543 ‘commits’ were, and let’s not even talk about rebasing or pull requests.

Now, I am somewhat fluent in the lingo, using the Github app, and committing and merging pull requests like a pro. ...Well, like a person who knows a little more about Github than she did three weeks ago, anyway. It’s so nice to have the veil lifted.

I even posted a picture of my first commit to instagram! I don’t usually use hashtags, but I did decide to tag it with #github, and even got some new followers. So popular.

Bower.json
Okay, I still don’t really know what these files do, but I gather they’re some kind of packaging tool for files. I’ve always waved at them as I downloaded plugins, swiftly throwing them into the trash. But yesterday I actually taught myself how to open them with terminal! These are exciting times.

Terminal
Probably the scariest thing on your computer that 90% of people don’t know how to access, much less to use. And now I am running commands and doing all sorts of fun things. I know that the stuff I am doing is really basic, like running a local host to see live changes in my code, but it really feels like magic. Did you know that the act of typing three words into terminal can do a million different things? I even feel smarter when I watch episodes of Halt and Catch Fire and see them typing into the black abyss on their screens. Okay, the next step is to make a computer game!

Omg it's me!

Janky
Okay, this isn’t a developing thing, but more of a design term that I am realizing to be some kind of secret industry garbage word. Whenever I see a design that looks a little odd and makes me think that perhaps that the creator thought they could open up a pirated copy of Photoshop and call themselves a designer, the word janky is never far behind. Urban Dictionary defines it as:

I’ve been reading a lot of design articles online where designers will use the term to describe a project that just doesn’t give them that warm and fuzzy feeling. I guess it’s kind of the opposite of the way we might feel when we look at a piece of design that is simply universally good. Maybe it’s the way so many people felt when the iPhone was first revealed. You look at it, and you know it’s good. Janky is the deep, dark anti-version of that feeling. And now you know.