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Go on, google me.
A little while back when I was still job-hunting, I saw an interesting position come up with FI in Stockholm. They're the agency behind things like Google's 20 things I learned about browsers and the web. They were looking for a Web Producer to be clever and creative and innovative and insightful and all the usual things Web Producers are. I decided to apply but with such a high-profile agency, I figured my application had better be something appropriately clever and creative to get noticed.
I spent a couple of weeks tweaking key-words in my site to manipulate search results for the phrase "Awesomest Web Producer". I then used Moo to print up a postcard featuring a google search box with that phrase entered and the mouse cursor hovering over the "I'm feeling lucky" button (this trick doesn't work quite so well now that Google have launched Google Instant).
The postcard application 
I posted the card off to them with the job reference number on the back and the words "My application" handwritten. No name, no signature, no contact details. If the scheme worked, they'd find me, proving the value of taking me on. That was my thinking, anyway. To be honest, once I'd sent off the postcard, I figured that was the end of it. It was a cocky, big-headed move and probably wouldn't work.
It did work. Kinda. It worked perfectly on a technical level, at least: you could enter the phrase, hit the button and land on my CV site. If you didn't hit "I'm feeling lucky", you were still presented with a page of search results, each about me, my career history and some of my projects. It also worked to get FI to contact me. I went through a few stages of the recruitment process before we parted ways. I never did find out exactly why but I wasn't quite 'the right fit'.
Of course, if I'd gone there, I wouldn't be starting a kick-ass job with Nokia next week.
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Debugging
One of the interesting things about web development is the number of different layers involved. On a low-down technical level, there are bits clogging the tubes, higher up you have TCP/IP then HTTP. A little further up still and you have the HTML of the page and eventually, on the top, there's what it looks like when it arrives on the user's screen. A lot of debugging can be done at the source code level but there is a level between that and the way it looks - the Document Object Model (DOM). This is web page as it appears in the 'mind of the browser' and some of the most useful debugging tools allow you to look directly at it.
All the main browser platforms have tools either built-in or available as easy-to-install add-ons which allow you to play with the DOM, add elements to it, take them away, change behaviours or styles on-the-fly and generally feel like a brain surgeon sitting with an electrode in one hand and a nice, squishy brain in the other. Playing with your pages at this level is an extremely useful way to get a good feel for the structure of a page and how the browser 'thinks'.
Some of these DOM analysis tools allow access to another behind-the-scenes level of the process - network traffic. Every file - HTML, JavaScript, image, CSS, XML, etc - starts at the server at one end and finishes at the browser. Using a network analysis tool is like standing at the front door of a party watching everyone come in. You can see where they came from and what they looked like when they arrived so that if they look different later on, you can tell they've had a few too many trips to the punch bowl. Or something. I think the analogy went a bit wrong somewhere. You know what I mean.
There's a good in-depth but understandable article of how browsers actually work on the HTML5 Rocks site.
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Knots
Game design
I had an idea around Christmas for a new game design. it was basically to be a single or multi-player game where you would tie knots in a piece of ‘string’. The single-player game would focus on discovering new patterns while the multi-player one would be a time-based challenge where each would tie a knot, pass it over to their opponent and the first to untie it would win.
I built a basic prototype and had some fun inventing a few interesting knots (my favourite being ‘Yoda’) but didn't get round to doing anything with it. As I'm tidying up all my projects before immigrating to Germany, I figured I should just go ahead and put this out into the world.
Slightly technical bit
The system is built using an invisible 3x3 grid and 4 quadratic curves. The curves' start, control and end points are the centre of a tile. When you move a tile, it basically swaps position with the tile nearest where you drop it. This can also be done with multiple tiles simultaneously if you're on a multi-touch device. You can see the tiles if you enable debug mode. You can also switch between the two colour schemes it has at the moment.
Yoda in Knot form 
The only addition I've made to it since Christmas was to add on a system to allow players to save knots back into the system. I've only built in 22 patterns so if you make a nice, interesting or funny one, give it a recognisable name (nothing too rude, please) and save it, it will then be available to everybody who plays with it. You can also set whether the pattern is to count as ‘matched’ when rotated 90°, 180°, flipped vertically or flipped horizontally. Calculating the isomorphisms (when two knots look the same to the viewer but aren't necessarily the same to the computer) was probably the trickiest bit of the system.
Go, make.
If you're interested in taking the idea further, grab the code from GitHub and make something from it. The usual rules apply, if you make something from it that makes you a huge tonne of neverending cash, a credit would be nice and, if you felt generous, you could always buy me a larger TV.
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Forrst Podcast
Last year, I had an idea for a Web Development Podcast Breakfast Show. The idea was that I'd get up early-ish in the morning GMT, catch up on the overnight tech news and record a short, 15-minute-or-so podcast. By the time I had tidied it and uploaded, it'd still be early for the US so listeners over there would be able to listen to it over breakfast. There might even be a tie-in app which would automatically play it as an alarm clock. It was a great idea.
The only downside was that recording, editing and uploading a podcast daily is a heck of a lot of work and requires a serious commitment. I managed to do an offline dry run of it for a week before I woke up, turned over and went back to sleep. It turns out the only downside is a major one.
Bearing that in mind, I have a lot of respect for the guys that run The Forrst Podcast, Mike Evans and Kenneth Love. True, they don't always manage to make the four-episodes-a-week they aim for but they do record more often than not. At the time of writing this, they've just publish episode 115 having been going for about 8 months.
Last week, I got in touch with them and mentioned that if they ever wanted a guest presenter they should give me a shout. Being the nice fellas they are, less than 24 hours later, I was recording with them. They actually would have had me on the same day I got in touch but I was balancing a drooling, sleeping, slightly sickly Oskar on me at the time and he has a tendency to gunk up the keys if I'm too close to the computer.
Long story short, if you're interested in tech, design and development news on a more-or-less daily-ish basis, I recommend subscribing to the Forrst Podcast. And, of course, if you're looking for a sample to find out what it's like, I can only recommend Episode 113 featuring a guest presenter who, hopefully, will be allowed back some day...
