Thomas Ballard - Personal Website

Personal Website Housekeeping. Just a quick summary of my goals for this site. (1) Maintain a semblance of permanence on the web. Hopefully you can always find me here--even after projects culminate and connections atrophy. (2) Provide a home for my resume, samples, documentation, contributions and so on. (3) Experiment, and remind myself why I love (and hate) being a professional web developer.

Digital Resume. Creating and maintaining a resume in an electronic form, using open standards based technology accessible via the web has been a powerful tool. It was a good idea when we started doing this years ago and has in the ensuing years been vetted by companies (you know who you are, some of you are even public now) who started trying to capitalize on the idea. ;-) Welcome aboard, helping people isn't just good, it seems to be good for business too!

While I'm engaged in active day-job oriented roles I've tended to let entropy nibble at my resume, but coming back to it always seems to help focus and organize my efforts to build and maintain relevant skills in the constantly evolving environment here on the Web.

Using the web for my resume seems straight forward, but just to be clear, here are some advantages to keeping a resume online. A website gives you a 24/7 location where a prospective employer can access your resume. If you need a hardcopy (it's true, some folks still use these), you can print and send your resume from the electronic copy. Or, if they desire to have it emailed, you can save a tree. Providing access to your summary and samples through a simple address (.me domain), on a business card, or a thumb drive may be a great way to begin to differentiate yourself.

Samples, Documentation, Contributions. Everything said about a resume applies for your portfolio of work samples, documentation that you may generate, or collaborative contributions you make. Whether you are an artist, illustrator, poet, animator, game programmer, musician, film maker, or virtually anything else having personal web space to showcase your efforts can help you achieve your goal.

Experimenting. I love JavaScript; even with years invested I still discover new wrinkles and features in every project. It's awesome! Some of these efforts get the time and energy to create examples and learning resources to help teach my kids ideas from school, and now with college prep as well as their own projects. (If you think it's fun to learn this stuff yourself, helping your children or other young folks see their own web creations take form is even more satisfying!) Many of these efforts on my part are littered throughout this site and others. Adding the note here to remind myself to assemble these into a more readily accessible list here as cycles permit.

Links to Projects, Favorites, and Other Miscellanea

Creating with Metadata I've been fiddling with using metadata to inform interface for years and continue to be pleasantly surprised to find how well it scales to accommodate increasingly complex projects. The idea builds on the practice of breaking out the layers of abstraction involved in producing applications into roles and skillsets that can be developed in parallel and married together later as the various pieces become built out by codifying contract very early in the development cycle.

I have been disappointed to find that it's sometimes difficult to communicate the benefits and process, which I consider to be a personal failing rather than a problem with the concept. I hope to learn to overcome this with more practice. I thought I'd add it here as a reminder to begin assembling some examples that illustrate pieces of the approach, and to help me organize a personal effort to communicate the pros and cons better.

An example building a table using a renderer to consume a JSON data structure shows a simple example of how to begin constructing an engine to build UI through data discovery. While the example uses static data, by simply interpolating the values via JSP, Mason, TT, or your preferred variable substitution language, or by returning the JSON in an AJAX response its easy to see how this technique is used to build user interface to provide a visitor with access to the data. This shows a readonly table, but the concept easily scales to accommodate dynamic form generation. Thinking bigger, imagine informing games, utilities, educational resources, etc. with a similar practice.

How to build a reusable data table from JSON

Building your own personal website. Today there are lots of options for building your own site, or something like it. If you are technically minded and disposed to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript then the sky is the limit. If you are gadget inclined, there are a plethora of tools and social networking sites which might tickle your fancy better by freeing you from the technical minutia of web development and instead letting you focus on the technical minutia of connecting with all your friends devices. If on the other hand you are neither and instead you just want a place to put up your basic contact info and some linguistic expression of your interests or hobbies, there are tools and providers which can "get you online" in minutes.

Some tools to consider if you are just starting out might include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, and Blogspot. These offer a smattering of corralled tool sets which can help guide you through the otherwise technically challenging process of doing what they do--namely, connecting to friends, connecting to business colleagues, connecting to your favorite bands or fans (if you are in a favorite band), and sharing your photo memories without writing the HTML yourself.

While these tools are great, there are things they don't do; things that you might want to do. In my case, I like writing games and tools, these generally take the form of HTML, CSS, JavaScript... most of which don't play nice in a tool that already uses those things to do something else. So, if you try to upload a game to one of these tools--you can't. You might take on learning Flash (or HTML5 if you don't like buying expensive software and don't mind waiting until folks with conflicting interests work out your sand box.) Personally, I think the best overall solution is to simply find a web hosting provider, purchase a domain name or two, and build and maintain your own website. And, there's nothing preventing you from doing all of the above, choosing to leverage the best aspects of all of the tools mentioned (and more), and then using your own personal website to tie everything together, and provide web space for your projects which don't fit into any of those tool providers business and marketing plans.

You can find more info about hosting and domains here

Hangman and Free Word Puzzles Project. Lately I've been revisiting a hangman game engine I wrote long ago. It's was written using front-end JavaScript and some client-side game programming techniques. The front door for the project is here: Play Hangman Game. Here are some popular customized variations. Check a few out to see the differences. Grab the link code for your own site if you like it.

Examples of "front-ends" on the web, which introduce the games from different view points.

Amazon.com Widgets

MP3 Music Widget. I've been test driving Amazon's music widget. Personally I wish it played full songs rather than clips, perhaps of reduced quality so the incentive to buy a song you want to keep in your collection was still there. And, the fact that the sampling doesn't include the section of a song I particularly like means I can't use the mechanism to communicate that detail to a friend. But, the clips provide an archaic sampling of a specific song so you can refer to it in slightly less vagary than humming bars of the tune at least. Nonetheless, I love digital music because it's so much more convenient than the record store model, and with projects like the music genome taking surprising and inspiring journeys through genres can be delightful. Of late I tend to gravitate toward music that keeps the rails of computer programming superconductive and creative without requiring attention diversion.

Recent Favorite Artists and Music.

Myspace Playlists - Great for a quick programming session, stream these artists over MySpace.

Recent Favorite Books and Movies. I love reading. I prefer technical reference manuals, and non-fiction, but I also enjoy the occasional jaunt into science fiction, and occasionally fantasy novels. Movies can also be a great escape, though more often than not it seems they are just something comically overproduced or group-thunk into impotence. Here are the latest items to make my favorites.

Thomas Ballard's - Personal Website

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