For the past few years, I’ve been working on a side project at the University of New Mexico. There’s not a public-facing aspect to it that’s worth highlighting, but the administrative side is a very heavy JavaScript application, and it didn’t start that way.

There are several pages to the application, each of which is dedicated to a major piece of functionality. As our registered user base has grown, the amount of information that needs to be managed has grown quite a bit, and some of my earlier pages were really starting to slow down.

When I’m playing Settlers of Catan with friends, it always seems like either 6 or 8 is really hot, and dominates the rolls. I realize that they’re common rolls, and that 7 is theoretically the most common roll, but it never quite seems that way, that either 6 or 8 is dominant. It also seems like 5 or 9 is way more frequent than its statistical pairing, and I’ve wanted an easy way to track these stats in the past.

I remember when I used to feel a little shame in missing a post for one month. Then a few months. Now? We’re looking at nearly a year — and it’s been kind of a crazy year. It’s not over yet, but I find myself in a reflective mood tonight, so, hey.

In 2009, I spent some time playing with some HTML5 APIs, as evidenced by the drum kit and my little canvas demos and such. I’d spent more and more of my free time researching and studying JavaScript more and more. A lot of my little canvas demos had pushed me into looking into optimizations and ways to stop memory leaks.

I still wouldn’t call myself an optimization master, but I’d definitely picked up a number of best practices along the way, which led me to giving a couple of small talks:

• Tuesday, March 2, 2010: HTML5 in 5 at IgniteNM 5
• Wednesday, April 7, 2010: Rasters, Vectors, and Scripting, Oh My at Webuquerque (I seriously regret that goofy title)

Both talks were volunteer affairs – I wasn’t explicitly asked to talk, I just like to talk about things that excite me. However, the Webuquerque talk led me in an interesting direction.

Long story short, I took a chance, put myself out there, and earned a spot on the SitePen team. I’ve always been fortunate to work for good companies, but I have to say, working for SitePen has been an absolute dream come true. I get to work in JavaScript in some capacity every single day. I’ve gotten to build some really awesome things, to learn leaps and bounds in an immensely short period, and I work with some of the most amazing minds in JS today. It couldn’t be better, and I look forward to being a SitePenner for years to come.

Incidentally, if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be working in JS every day and loving it, I’d have laughed at you, hard.

This year hasn’t been perfect, by any means. However, it’s definitely been a life-changing one. I really feel like I’m no longer just working a job, but really developing a career. I’ve had some amazing highs and amazing lows in 2010, and even though there’s still a month left to it, I know this year is going to go down in my books as one of the most amazing on record.

So, there’s that. I could say (again) that I’m going to try to post more (again), and I really do hope that’s the case. This blog’s definitely been more personal than technical in the past, but I suspect it’ll move more towards tech stuff at this point, with a rather heavy JS slant.

It’s not that I’m against personal sharing, and I’ll definitely be doing so, but it’s a different world and I’m a different person, and frankly, I suspect it’d be kinda boring if I told you all that I ate lunch at Dion’s again.

Oh, also, I’m down ~30 pounds this year too, which is nice, though I’m definitely kind of hitting up against a wall — but I can’t complain. I mean, 30 pounds is awesome.

I’m hoping to make this more of a thing, where I make fun little toys in HTML5. I made my drum kit sometime back, and had played around with some last year. Since I’m kind of signed up to talk at Webuquerque on the topic of and similar such technology (at the time of my speech in April, Firefox 3.7 should be in some late beta, if not RC, hopefully, meaning WebGL will soon be upon us), well, I should probably actually learn what the heck I’m talking about.

So then, here’s a fun little toy I made. For lack of a better name, I just called it Stars and put it somewhere under my RandomThink.net Labs area (which may someday get its own content management setup, which I hoped to do in EE but it’s just easier to hack on plain files for that so who knows). It needs some better documentation, but I’m sorta-working on a better version with more controls. I’ll be sure to blather on about it at that point.

I’m more apt to quickly shout about these sorts of things on Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook), so if you want to be in the know, you should maybe follow me on Twitter here or add me on Facebook here. Also worth noting, there’s an RSS feed of my tweets here, if you want to listen without being a tweeter. However, that doesn’t filter out any replies I make to others, so, y’know, you’ll be getting one side of a conversation without seeing the rest. Anyhow. Maybe I’ll install Twitter Tools to incorporate my tweets more heavily into the blog or something.

But yeah. Stars. Go play. Start the animation, then move over and hold down the mouse button somewhere for a fast spray of stars, or use the click-hold to queue up a ton of stars while not animating. Dabble a bit. Trace out your name in stars before animating and then start it up. Eventually you can put enough stars to cause some lag, but it’s really not too terrible.

Hello!

If you’re finding this blog for the first time from my HTML5 Drum Kit from this post on Ajaxian.com, welcome to my meager site!

I feel like a cobbler who has no shoes of his own – or perhaps, one that is wearing a brand name instead of his own. I haven’t invested proper time on my personal site. For that I apologize. I’m working on a better version (possibly either a custom CMS or moved into ExpressionEngine). Hopefully I’ll get to do that over the fourth.

I’ve done a few other things, namely some stuff with a year ago or so. It’s all in the RandomThink Labs, which are all pretty ugly right now visually, but hey, that’s part of the cleanup/rework I want to undertake. All the code in the labs is under an MIT license and also available at this GitHub repo if you want to just grab it all.

Thanks for stopping by!