Matt Mehlhope

“What?!” A developer angrily inquired, after ripping his earbuds out of his head.

“…I’ve got a question…” The other person asked, now sheepish.

Picking up his laptop, “You’ve always got a question, everyone’s always got questions. Can’t you just message me or something? I’m trying to get shit done!” replied the developer, as he stormed out.

The scene described above is something I’ve seen happen several times since the company’s web team moved to a cube farm from a shared-office setup. Nearly two years ago I wrote about my expectations for the move. Even then I had a grave outlook for my expected productivity, but hardly considered the sociological effects the area would have on us. Now that I have worked in the new environment for some time, I am able to give a somewhat objective depiction of how the team has changed.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a code oriented meeting in which people are going over issues and you find yourself dozed off in the corner – you’ve got an empathy problem. It isn’t explicitly because you’re a jackass (which, you very well may be), but because you cannot relate to the issues. Maybe you’ve never coded a REST interface before, handled the scaling issues of a database, or written the markup for a responsive website. You don’t know what pitfalls exist, what complexities often arise, or what technical challenges are present — it’s all unfamiliar and unknown. To remedy this, a colleague — Willie Miller — and I engaged in what we call “dev swap.”

In my previous post I introduced the concept of Responsible Web Design, which transcends any particular design methodology and is rather a holistic approach to ensuring that web content is delivered effectively to all audiences and mediums. It’s no secret that over the course of the past decade we, as designers and developers, have been doing our best to make content work across browsers. But, we’ve ignored our responsibility to support all devices or the fringe users of our sites. It’s time for that to change.

As web designers and developers, we carry the heavy burden of ensuring that content is delivered to an incredibly heterogenius audience – internet-enabled devices. These devices come in different shapes, sizes, and capacities. Regardless of their capabilities each device platform deserves the same level of respect, something that we have not historically given each equally. While responsive and adaptive web design have become buzz words in the industry, they are simply emblematic of our need to design responsibly — for all users and devices — rather than for the capable few.

Nearly 6 months ago I began to feel a pain in my lower back, just above my left buttock that was nearly unbearable when doing certain movements or exercises. I recalled having a similar pain just over a year ago on the opposite side of my back that was due to an inflammation of the muscles and nerves around my sacrum (the fused joint where you spine connects to your pelvis). Like a good patient, I de-loaded my weights in the gym and took ample amounts of ibuprofen, iced the area and was fairly liberal in the length of my hot showers. I expected the pain to go away like it had before, but if anything it got worse.

As promised, just a quick note to say that our refresh of BossBlueprint is now live! My colleague and I would love for you to give us feedback, which you can easily do via the “submit feedback” button on the right side of your browser window when viewing the new site. We’ll be monitoring the activity extensively over the next week or so and start our implementation of changes and some new features over the next few weeks. We’re very much looking forward to attending the upcoming BlizzCon 2011 and meeting with our users, as well as rocking out to the recently announced Foo Fighters concert!

Thank you for all of your support and we look forward to improving the tool further in the near future.

As I write this my colleague and I are putting the final touches of the brand new version of BossBlueprint which has been re-worked from the ground up.

We initially created the tool in a little under 20 working hours and never intended for it to get as large as it has; we did not design it to be scalable, or even optimal in any respect, we just just wanted to see if we could make it work.

Well, it worked.

It has been 3 long, barren years in the professional gaming (i.e., eSports) scene. Ever since the abrupt cancellation of the Championship Gaming Series in 2008 and the shut down of CPL shortly before that, few have been willing to invest into making competitive gaming a viable industry. While console games such as Halo and Call of Duty have had meager competitions and some success within the professional gaming sphere recently, there hasn’t been anything to fill the PC gaming void that Quake, Counter Strike, and Warcraft 3 left behind…until now.

While there were several facets of my first salaried gig out of college I didn’t like, the one main perk I had was an office with a window. Little did I know how fortunate I was to be able to see the outside with such ease, much less the ability to close my door at a whim for undisturbed work. As anyone that has ever done web development and/or design knows, when you get into “the zone” your code and design seems to flow effortless from your fingers onto the screen; however, the moment that “zone” is interrupted, you’ve lost it, sometimes for the rest of the day.

I caught the StrongLifts 5×5 bug 12 weeks ago as I really wanted to improve my strength. I started with the weight amounts the program suggests and moved up gradually as instructed. Starting out I was 5’11″, 180lbs, and my squats were a measly 115lbs with good form.

Before long I found myself knocking out 200lb squats with relative ease. As time progressed I was loading two plates and some change on each side, reaching a respectable 245lbs. In a little over 2 months I had increased my squat weight by over 130lbs, which by most standards is phenomenal progress. Unfortunately, I had become victim of my own ego along the way, sacrificing my form and squat depth for sheer weight and perceived strength.