wheresrhys

I won’t go into details, but I’ve had quite a tough month or so in the web programming side of my life. A lot of hard work and dedication leading to a very unsatisfactory ending – the first time in my adult life I’ve left a job with a bitter taste in my mouth.

So I thought I’d write this to say thank you to everyone who has, in the same time period, contributed to the small flood of comments relating to my two jQuery plugins – fullTextArea and crossSelect. Up until recently I had no idea anyone was even using them, so it really brightened the last 4 weeks to know that the free time I put into programming is appreciated (even if the same can’t be said for paid work all the time).

So thank you again for restoring my faith in the programming community. I’ll get on to incorporating the best suggestions as soon as I can.

I didn’t take the traditional route to my present career. After graduating in maths I knew I didn’t want to take the obvious route of becoming an actuary or accountant as maths, contrary to popular belief, is nothing remotely to do with adding up (although, in hindsight I reckon being an actuary might be fairly interesting, but you still have to mix with graduate training scheme types).

So many years later, after leaning web-wards through a series of charities and lower jobs, I find myself a reasonably competent web-developer.

But I still have a lot to learn and the book I’m reading (Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin) is proving to be a great source of ideas to stretch my programming legs. Making websites is all well and good, but the examples of complex systems emerging from simple rules, and the constant talk of computer models, has given me the impetus to stretch my abilities to making convoluted programs to model certain behaviours.

The first one I’ve attempted is the following scenario:

You have N buttons and an unlimited number of threads. You pick up 2 buttons and connect them with a thread, and then do this repeatedly.

So I wrote something to produce a graph of interesting things to keep track of during this process.

It’s also given me the idea for a jQuery plugin