This is fascinating stuff.
The future...
21 May 2013
The lack of
14 May 2013
In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.
Admittedly, I don't know who has a college degree in computer science on our team. I don't.
Modern Web Development Workshop
7 May 2013
Yesterday, we hosted the first Modern Web Development workshop here in Portland, Oregon. Jack and Brian took attendees on a tour of Bootstrap, Sass, Git, and Jekyll.
I snuck in and took a few photos…
Argon Trail
6 May 2013
On April 28th, 2013… we rented a bus to take nearly 50 Ruby on Rails developers who traveled to Portland for RailsConf 2013 on a hike. Here is a group shot of nearly everyone.
We hope you had as much of a blast as we did!
Alternative things to do while in town for RailsConf
16 Apr 2013
While in PDX for RailsConf 2013, if you find yourself wanting to checkout gamer havens this article has you covered.
The Best Parts of An Event Apart Seattle 2013
10 Apr 2013
Last week, Brian and I sat with our peers in rapt attention at the Seattle occurrence of An Event Apart, the inspiring one-track web conference started by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer in 2005. Known as “the design conference for people who make websites,” AEA is a particularly acclaimed web conference for good reason. Zeldman and Meyer, visionaries famous for helping shape the web as we know it, gather a dozen of the web’s most influential creators and gifted presenters to share their thoughts, inquiries, and discoveries with the several hundred fortunate attendees.
Since you were too busy vacuuming and/or getting your tires rotated to attend, I’ve summarized the best parts. Enjoy!
Planet Argon Gets an Intern!
8 Apr 2013
Hey! My name is Corinne and I’m excited to introduce myself as Planet Argon’s first intern! I’m currently a student studying art, graphic and web design at Portland State University. I was lucky enough to land an intern position here at Planet Argon.
A large part of my education has been from studying resources on the web. And by “studying” I mean for four or five months I locked myself in my apartment and tried to learn as much as I could about web design and development.
So, as you can imagine, after a while this got pretty lonely. The amount of information out there was daunting. I decided to put my new skills to use and launched a portfolio site in hopes I’d be able to land an internship where I could learn around professionals.
Can I Use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8?
3 Apr 2013
Here is a little knowledge nugget that Jack and I picked up during our time at An Event Apart: Seattle (more on that to come). We learned about this handy little site called caniuse.com that was created by Alexis Deveria. The site lets you look up HTML5, CSS, JS API, SVG, etc. elements to see what their support is across browsers. Then you can assess.. Can I use that?
We are freshly back from the conference and I have already started using and benefiting from it. Give it a look and find out what you can use. (Turns out you can use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8!)
A New Partnership with Meyer Memorial Trust
1 Apr 2013
Welcome Meyer Memorial Trust to the Planet Argon team!
Did Google kill RSS?
13 Mar 2013
The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.
My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?