Comments on: Nerds – you can’t know it all.

By: Pam Jones

Pam Jones — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:45:07 +0000

I am awed. I too should focus on a specific 2nd career. Pushing paper is no fun. I definitely do not want to be a manager. I want to develop websites. There is so much too learn. I have to laugh at myself… I get frustrated trying to establish links within a page. I have a long way to go! I haven’t begun to crawl so Alex and other aspiring web developers hang in! That’s for me too!

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:28:18 +0000

wow… Let me think what nerd career should I focus.. For now I’m playing the role of my life as a web developer and focusing on PHP as server side scripting…. Anyway, I’m still new to it.. still too young.. ^_^. ..

By: ronny stalker

ronny stalker — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:21:45 +0000

I’ve been feeling the same way – although I have worked out a solution to this memory problem.

Whenever I do something techie, I create a new wiki page for the task/mission on a password-protected personal Trac site. (Trac is an open source ”project management ticketing application”).

I have two kinds of wiki pages for each techie thing that i do; First is a P.O.A (Plan of Action). The other is a ”HowTo”.

As I learn, google search and research how to do the particular task I scribble my progress in my POA notes.

Then once i have finished the task – i get on with my life.

Months later, if i need to repeat the task again, i go through my POA page and transfer the knowledge over to a ”HowTo” page – writing it up more neatly.

Then, every time i need to repeat the task, i search my wiki and its all there for me: a personal step-by-step tutorial that gets the job done in next-to-no-time.

I highly recommend it.

Here’s a sample of my pages (note they are named in wiki format):

# HowToAddAnEmailAccountToOutlook
# HowToBackUpDataBase

# POAsMovingtoHomeOffice
# POAsSetUpQueryCaching

# POAsThingsToIncludeInTermsAndConditions

By: Leon Quinn

Leon Quinn — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:22:50 +0000

Hello fellow nerd! What I wouldn’t give for a photographic memory!! You could rule the world…

By: Jacksonville Website Design

Jacksonville Website Design — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:59:13 +0000

The fact of the matter is technology keeps changing. Also there’s so much to know, it’s so dang hard to keep up with all this. If i were to come up with a list of essentials i would have stated the same thing as you.
-jared b.

By: Stefan Mischook

Stefan Mischook — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:16:49 +0000

Tony G,

That would be a good chart indeed.

Stefan

By: Tony G

Tony G — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:47:42 +0000

It’s refreshing to see someone else admit this. Although I am sure that there are some people who DO know it all, they are no doubt extremely rare. It is no doubt easy to become very familiar with one syntax but, once you decide to learn something new, it seems that the old stuff becomes much harder to recall.

I think part of the problem is that the languages are so similar in many respects, that you forget for example how the date formats work in Javascript, versus PHP, versus Actionscript 2.0/3.0 or what have you. (CSS and HTML are basic enough and sort of fall into a general, all purpose, not-easy-to-forget category).

I have often thought that it would be helpful to have sort of a matrix that shows the syntax for each of the top 5 or so web languages (these will vary for every developer no doubt) to serve as a cheatsheet/memory aid to review the basic syntax for each.

IE –

Array declaration:
Javascript: var myArray = new Array();
PHP: $myArray = array ();
Actionscript 3.0: var myArray:Array = new Array();

Of course it would all be in a nice well-formatted table, etc. Has anyone encountered such a beast? Maybe it already exists . . .

By: Graham Strong

Graham Strong — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:24:05 +0000

Hey Stefan,

Yes, I’m finding the older I get, the less I remember! A sad state of affairs…

One other comment: why not ASP instead of PHP? It’s just as powerful, easier to learn, and there are a lot of great resources for it out there. PHP is more of a “programmers” programming language, whereas even do-it-yourselfers can pick up some useful ASP scripting.

~Graham

By: Stefan Mischook

Stefan Mischook — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:13:07 +0000

Juice,

I would agree, basic design these days means you should learn some sort of image editor, whether it be Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

We have a bunch of videos on the subject coming out soon.

Stefan

By: Juice

Juice — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:09:04 +0000

Wow,

I need to sit down and evaluate my strenghth and weakness…I too believe it’s good to discover the basics for each program and decide which is the better fit.

Stefan, what about learning basic photoshop/paint shop pro? I thought that is part of design centric.