Yesterday, I decided to mess around with 3D CSS transforms. I've used them here and there for various things (the flip animations in Shelvi.st, for example) but nothing silly.
My mind wandered back to an early HTML5 canvas demo I saw ages ago where Jacob Seidelin had written Super Mario Kart in JS and I wondered if it would be possible to do the pixel-pushing part of that demo in CSS.
Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's nothing like playing Mario Kart and, no, there isn't any acceleration. That wasn't the point, however. View the source to see the description of the rotations and transforms.
Okay, here's a bit of silliness. I did a little presentation yesterday with some slides which I built using Hakim El Hattab's 3D CSS Slideshow. I decided to have some fun with the last slide.
Just in case you don’t know, a Version Control System (VCS) is pretty much the most important thing ever in the history of anything ever. Just think about it conceptually: the ability to stand back and look at everything you’ve ever done, choose the good bits, drop the bad bits, mop up the mistakes… it gives you the freedom to “Play with it ‘til it breaks” with the safety net that you can always go back and fix it again.
You Get To Play With Time Itself!
There are many, many debates about the different methodologies you can use with version control and which technologies are best suited to which methodologies and which interfaces are best suited to which technologies and so on ad nauseam. The main concepts of working with any VCS are essentially the same, however.
It must be almost invisible.
It must be completely reliable
You mustn’t rely on it
It must be almost invisible
If you have never used a VCS before, it must fit perfectly into your workflow otherwise you won’t do it. It isn’t until you’ve been saved from potential disaster by a system that you will truly appreciate it and see the value in working it into your process. If you have or are currently using a VCS, think about when and how you use it. Does it require launching a new application or does it run in the background? Do you have to manually check things in or is it seamless versioning? The more effort required to mark a version, the less often you’ll do it as it breaks the flow of development
On the other hand, if the process is completely invisible, you might forget it’s there. It’s exactly the same as assuming your changes are going live on the server – the moment you assume it happens, it doesn’t. You still need some level of manual checking.
It must be completely reliable
This is fairly obvious, hopefully. You need the security that your version system is working otherwise you might again be tempted to miss it out – why take the extra step required to version a file if it’s not going to be there when I need it?
If you’re hosting your own repositories internally to your organisation, don’t put it on a server older than you are. The safest route to go down is contracted external hosting. That way, it’s someone’s job to make sure your datums are secure.
You mustn’t rely on it
Always have a backup. Always have a copy. Always have an escape route. Or something. You should have picked up the theme by now. Version Control Systems are great but as soon as it is the only thing standing between you and a complete failure to deliver a project, it will fail. Or not. It’s funny like that.
This weekend, I had a spare couple of hours on Saturday night (as often happens when you have a kid) so I decided to pass the time with a bit of copy-paste coding.
There are many developers who will tell you that blindly copy-pasting is a terrible way to code. They make the valid points that you don't understand something if you don't read it properly and that you'll end up stuck down an algorithmic cul-de-sac with no way to three-point-turn your way out (although they may phrase it differently). These are valid points but...
If I'd sat down on Saturday night and thought "I want to build something in Box2D" then gone to the site, downloaded the library, read the docs and loaded the examples, by the time I had understood what I was doing, Sunday morning would have come round and I'd still have GameJS to read up on. There's absolutely no harm in blindly catapulting yourself a long way down the development track then looking round to see where you are. Sure, you'll end up somewhere unfamiliar and you may end up with absolutely no clue what the code around you does but at least you have something to look at while you figure it out. At least a few times, you'll find something almost works and a quick search of the docs later, you've figured it out and know what it's doing.
Basically, copy-pasting together a simple little demo and making it work is a lot more interesting than taking baby-steps through example code and beginner tutorials. Don't be too careful about trying to build something complicated.
