toot is the sound you make to draw attention to yourself. toot is a fruit that consists of little particles that make up a whole. toots belongs to a tree. toots is sweet. toot toot comes in different colours. No, really, what is this site?
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Javascript from hell
Without going into the detail of what happened, something in toot’s code was broken. Now, I’m no programmer, but maybe a can, sometimes, sort of, think like one. The only programming language I ‘mastered’ was BASIC, and that was around, what? 1985..
Of course, over the past 10 years I got interested in stuff like php, and Javascript.. But I never really learned any of those languages. No time, man!
Anyway. Yesterday, this code problem was driving us all mad. Deep down inside I felt there must be a simple solution to it. But it was a nightmarish feeling: knowing that you can reach somewhere but feeling unable to move to that point. In this case it was my lack of actual coding knowledge. I went home in a depressed state.
But I did not give up. Sitting alone after everyone went to sleep, I started browsing the net looking for Javascripts and some info. I found a number of scripts, some large and complex, some really simple (which even I could understand). I took the simplest script, then started playing around with some scripts that come with Dreamweaver. I started hacking the scripts. I combined some stuff. Trial and error. Little steps. Reload. Reload. Reload.
Then at around 1 am it finally clicked. A solution for part of our problem was there.
But with the deadline for the launch looming, what i ‘created’ still was not THE solution. So today I was anxious to talk to Jad about what I created. In the evening we were on the phone, me at home and him at the office. He was about to try out something totally new to solve that damn problem. But I convinced him to try something.
Over the next 10 or 15 minutes we started hacking together my solution with part of what we had already.. Reload. And BOOM it worked. It felt GREAT.
In the larger context of things, what we did was not something major. We did not invent a rocket. It might still turn out that the ’solution’ needs a lot of refinement. But I felt satisfied to have followed my gut feeling and arriving at exactly the soultion I had in my mind. The moral of the story: simplify, hack, test, retry, reload!
3 Responses to “Javascript from hell”
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January 1st, 2006 at 11:55 am
I should say Ahmad and Jad were very determined to solve the Javascript problem. The problem took some time to be solved, but at the end it was solved nicely.
In my life, I met very few people like Ahmad who would detour from their core-competence in life, dive into grey areas of their knowledge, grasp in few days how things work in that area of knowledge, and then come up with solutions to problems. This was something amazing and admiring to see. Of course, I wouldn’t fail to mention that Jad who studied political science and law for his bachelor degree is today the (italics) programmer and code guru of toot.
At one point of witnessing all this, I felt we will never get this solved before the launch. In fact, I was kind of pissed off deep inside me because I felt this problem was taking a lot of time and sucking most of the energy and nerves of two key members of the toot team on just one aspect of toot functionality. However, now that it solved, there are lessons to learn.
Happy Javascript!
January 1st, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for the comment mate.. grey area indeed :) The real credit goes to those great programmers out there on the net. Their spirit of volunteerism and shring of info mad our hack (it is still a hack) possible. We have make sure we send thak you notes to a couple of site owners/programmers out there.
January 15th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Javascript is the pits! I mean it rocks with the things you can do with it, but the syntax is mind-numbing! Etc. Welcome Toot. Great site thingie.