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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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Struggle

18 May 2003

You know how when developing or designing something for the web and it’s not going right, you fiddle and struggle with it for ages trying to get it work right in this browser and that browser and every browser and non-browser and it’s just not going right? Your view of the work you were so proud of previously has been seriously tarnished by the fact that you just can’t get it working.

Or like putting the first dent or scratch in your new car. I’ve heard it described as ‘knocking the god’ out of something – the thing you once worshiped or held in high regard is now reduced to something significantly less, even though it’s not changed that much.

It’s disappointing and frustrating and off-pissing. It’s a hard place to recover from. It’s not easy to set those feelings aside.

Well, I’ve been feeling that way for quite a few months now. Not because of code or cars. Something needs to be done.

I learned some potentially interesting news on Friday. Can’t say anything at the moment, but we’ll see how it goes.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Nathan Pitman: Drew ur such a tease. Get us all interested and then intentionally fail to divulge the juicy info. ;)
  2. § Jesse: I thought that is why CSS was created? ;)
  3. § Jason Hoffman: Cool stuff is almost always preceded by a plateau (or a dip), that just how it is. Frustrating but you’re likely getting ready to move up a level.
  4. § Nathan Pitman: Jason is right, that’s just the way it is. My first 6 months with my previous employer were rapid and I learnt a huge amount, then I hit a flat spot, stuck it out for a year in the hope things might change, got fed up with waiting and so made that change happen myself. :)
  5. § Jason Hoffman: Reading George’s Leonard Mastery about 10 years ago was when I realized that.
  6. § Drew McLellan: I think you guys are right. One mans frustrations are another mans challenges. The trick is making sure your life is full of challenges rather than frustrations.

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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