Category - Software & Technology

In high school I was seriously considering joining the coast guard. That is, until a recruiter came in to speak to us. He was singly the most pompous person I have ever met in my life. Point blank, he told us that he was wasting his time visiting us because 99% of us weren’t good enough to get in anyhow. He then spent 10 obligatory minutes going over what a career in the coast guard was like before leaving without entertaining any questions. I no longer wanted to be in the coast guard. If the recruiter we met was the face of the organization, I had no interest in ever becoming a part of it.

While it is important to be selective, even highly selective, it is equally important to not rub your selectiveness in people’s faces. Companies have to be selective when hiring else they risk becoming diluted with second rate talent and stagnating in the market. However, companies also have to maintain a public persona such that they are viewed in a positive light be the majority. If companies find a hiring model that works for them, allows them to be competitive, and reduces the attrition rate then more power to them.

After passing out a recent post by Steve Yegge to a couple colleagues and friends I solicited a response on what they thought of the process. Some felt that the elitist approach was pretentious but all agreed that is was necessary to ensure a top notch group of engineers. When you are the company that everyone wants to be and most people emulate, you have some leeway to be selective. However, selectiveness should be weighed carefully against public persona. When the selectiveness reaches a point that people lose interest in working for you then it is time to scale back a bit. Google seems to have found their niche in this respect as they are a highly selective company but still the firm that most engineers would work for, given the chance.

There is a blurry line between being snobby and being selective.  Snobby in the eyes of some is selective in the eyes of others. The important thing for any company, whether a three person crew in a garage or Google, is to find the balance that works best for their firm. For some this will mean a high degree of selectiveness, and thus perceived pretension, while for others this will mean a less selective process and a slightly less efficient talent pool.

There is more design patterns gear ready now. You can get it here. There are about 70 variations of shirts – single sided, double sided, dark, light, value, etc.

Be the belle of your LAN party! Grab some design patterns shirts now!

So I recently found myself designing an interface for the site where you can get design pattern gear and found myself needing a gradient image for the design I had in mind. So I popped open Macromedia Fireworks and drew myself a gradient image with the right colors then popped it into the page only to realize that I actually wanted the image a little bit darker at one end and a bit lighter at the other end. I did this three or four times before I said, “there has got to be an easier way.”

There is. In fact, I have a post about it from only a few weeks ago.

The image I needed was pretty simple – it was a gradient from light to dark that was 150 pixels high, followed by a solid colored dark block 90 pixels high, and finished by a dark to light gradient image 350 pixels high. Since this will be repeated via CSS I only needed it to be one pixel wide.

Using the schema associated with my Ant image generator, I wrote this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<imageBank xmlns="http://www.mcdonaldland.info"
           xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
           xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mcdonaldland.info/files/imageGenerator
           http://www.mcdonaldland.info/files/imageGenerator/images.xsd">

    <image name="bg" path="/images" format="png">
        <conjoinedImage position="top">
            <gradientImage width="1"
                       height="150"
                       color1="D9D9FF"
                       color2="000066"
                       gradientStartX="0"
                       gradientStartY="0"
                       gradientEndX="0"
                       gradientEndY="150"/>

            <conjoinedImage position="top">

                <plainImage width="1"
                            height="90"
                            color1="000066"/>

                <gradientImage width="1"
                           height="350"
                           color1="000066"
                           color2="D9D9FF"
                           gradientStartX="0"
                           gradientStartY="0"
                           gradientEndX="0"
                           gradientEndY="350"/>

            </conjoinedImage>
        </conjoinedImage>
    </image>
</imageBank>

Despite the verbose look of it, the structure is actually very simple. Since I really needed three images, the top gradient, the middle solid section, then the bottom gradient, I had to use the conjoinedImage type. The position attribute of the conjoined image will determine where the first portion of the content images is in relation to the second. In this case I defined gradientImage as the first portion and another conjoinedImage as the second. Since I defined the position as “top”, the gradientImage will appear directly on top of the conjoined image. I then followed this same principle for the second conjoinedImage to get a solid section on top of another gradient.

The huge benefit of this is that all I have to do to change the entire image is type a couple of numbers! This means that if I decide I want my page background to culminate in #E0E0E0 instead of #CCCCFF then I simply need to change the values in the correct portion of the images.xml file, run “ant”, and copy the file to the appropriate directory.

Here is the page that I eventually created (although I decided not to go with this design). The background gradient is the one defined in the XML above. The smoke/lightening banner I created with Gimp after viewing this tutorial. I changed the colors roughly 20-30 times through the design process and each time I found it extremely simple to get a new set of images for my background, thanks to the Ant based image generator.