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Things I wrote

  • Digital Magazines

    I am a big magazine reader, in fact I have one subscription that is now 20 years old; although sadly I'm letting it go this year, Newsweek's quality has dropped since Daily Beast took it over. When I got my iPad a year ago I was interested in trying out reading some magazines on it.

  • Head First Mobile Web

    I have spent the last week or so slowing reading through <em>Head First Mobile Web</em> by Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner. I have to admit that at first I was a bit turned off by the whole format of the Head First series, but after reading through it, I am a believer.

  • Respect

    My last post was on the culture of busy that I think is ingrained in most of our lives, but I looked at it from the perspective of the web world and how it is affecting me when I go out and talk with potential clients about work.

  • Cult of Busy

    I've been thinking a lot about the word busy lately. It is used all the time by most people these days. The typical response when two people greet each other and ask "How are you?" is busy. And if you do not say you are busy, you are most likely seen as strange. As I've become more established and reached out to more people about working with them on projects one of the interesting things I've had to figure out is setting expectations.

  • UI Iteration Done Right

    I have been doing the Codecademy Code Year courses for the past three months and during that time Codecademy has done some really wonderful tweaks and changes to their UI. This post is a review of what I've seen as far as the changes to the user experience doing the courses and not about the actual course content (although I may say a bit about that at the end).

  • Device Ponderings

    I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Most of them have been quite geeky and to be honest, it's been Jen Simmons on The Web Ahead. She's lately been interviewing a lot of people about mobile, Jason Grigsby, Luke Wroblewski, and most recently, Lyza Danger Gardner. As I work on different projects, I've been thinking about all these devices and what it means for what I build.

  • A bit of freshening up

    So I've done a bit of freshening up around here, well really, it's a completely new design. Most of the look and feel changed at least a bit on this site, but the real news for me is the code under the hood. I've been using Wordpress for almost a year now and when I created my original theme last year I have to admit that I cheated quite a bit.

  • This is it

    Well, this is it, today is my last day at my steady full time position. Tomorrow is my first day as an LLC; Susan Jean Robertson Development, LLC to be exact. I know, I can't believe it either! I am excited, scared, and nervous all at the same time. This idea has been in my head for years but the timing has never seemed right; that all changed in the last several months as the pieces came together.

  • World changing?

    This past week I was fortunate enough to attend the PIE Demo Day at the Bagdad Theater. I was excited to see what the first class of PIE had been up to and what was happening in the start up community here in Portland. It was a fun event and a new experience for me, I'd never heard anyone pitching their business looking for funding, so I learned quite a bit by watching.

  • 3 Things

    This past week I began the concrete moves toward a fairly risky and big change in my life. I'll talk more about it later here, but if you follow me on the Twitters, than you probably know what I'm talking about. But after I finally did the first concrete thing toward my goal, amazing things began to happen to me. And I relearned 3 very important things.

  • Hey, I'm learning

    Many months ago I wrote about <a href="http://susanjeanrobertson.com/code/my-dirty-secret/">my frustration in trying to learn JavaScript</a>. It has been my difficulty and my secret for far too long. So for the holidays I took vacation time and the week between Christmas and New Years I studied JavaScript. I am loaded up with books and I am also using a few online resources.

  • The Manual, Issue I

    This post is incredibly long overdue, but a while back I made my way through The Manual and enjoyed it thoroughly. I read it in various chunks, some on the bus, some while relaxing at home; but no matter where or when I stopped numerous times to reread a sentence and just ponder the idea presented to me. The authors are all excellent, all people who I have followed online and admire.

  • Conferences and Tribes

    A few weeks ago after I attended Web Directions South, I read a great post by Mark Boulton, Being Together, that got me thinking quite a bit about conferences and why I make it a point to attend and what I would really love to see happen.

  • Web Directions South

    I just returned from a lovely vacation in Sydney where I also happened to fit in a few days of geekery by attending [Web Directions South](http://south11.webdirections.org/). I wanted to attend this conference because I was excited about the people I could meet being on the other side of the world and I have never done a Web Directions event before and I have heard so many good things about them. Plus, who wouldn't want to go to Sydney?

  • Joys of Starting from Scratch

    Many may think that this post is odd, but when you toil in a large, bureaucratic organization, starting and working on something new, from scratch is a treat. Recently I got to do it three times. Instead of maintaining a five year old code base and just fixing and updating it or adding on a feature here or there, I was given new mock-ups and told to go wild.