Mario Vasquez

After years of having a website that was “under construction” I decided to slap a blog on the site and put whatever random thoughts that come to mind.

Me

I’m currently the Lead UI developer at simpleview.  My job consists of about 40% ColdFusion, 30% Jquery/CSS and 20% Flash.  I love what I do, I build the tools that users use to get their job done and I get to see the results.  I take whatever feedback I can get to learn to make things better.

I always thought I would become an awesome Flash developer but it seems that Tucson isn’t full of Flash jobs.  So while I wait for my big shot, I do ColdFusion, CSS and Jquery to pay the bills.

ColdFusion: I really like it because it easy to work with and it can do anything I can think of.  It also has the coolest name of any programming language out there, but that’s just my opinion.

Flash: Coming from a creative background in the late 90’s, I watched Flash transform from an animation software to a powerfull platform for all kinds of applications.  Animations like mudbubble and jibjab can be made on the same platform as applications like picnik and TweetDeck.  Lately, Flash has been in a lot of news because Apple has decided to keep the platform off of their magical iPhone.  <rant> They say it’s because it’s a performance hog and they think they can do just fine without it.  Maybe that’s true and maybe this was a wakeup call for Adobe to focus on performance and bring more attractive features to the platform but this move from Apple showed me that Apple is not the company I thought it was.  It looks like the poor creative kid on the block is getting grownup and wants to rule the world.  I still think Apple makes the best products out there and they have the best some of the best UX’s I’ve seen, but they may have gone a little too far by blocking the most popular and powerful plugin out there. </rant>

Jquery: Awesome javascript library that lets me do a lot of the basic tasks that Flash was usually used for, except in a way that most developers can easily work with without learning Flash.  This is probably the most popular library out there so you can find all kinds of plugins.  This sounds like a good thing, but just like anything else it could be overdone.  Like a fat kid in a candy store, you CAN get too much of a good thing.  Too many “cool tools” to make your website unique can bloat the page and could slow down performance.

CSS: Another great tool to handle the formatting of you page.  At first, it looks like a simple tool that you think you can master in a couple hours but no it can be just as powerful and complicated as most programming languages.  Why do I think this?  Because you have more than one web browser out there and each browser can translate that CSS a different way.  The current browsers aren’t too different but most users aren’t using a current browser so you have to make sure your CSS works for the majority or you can play the iPhone card and say your website only works with your requirements or nothing.  That’s cool, if you really want to be that guy but I like the challenge.

Well, that’s my intro, I hope to post more later.  In the mean time, you can follow me on Twitter if you really want to hear more random nerd thoughts: @_mariov_