I recently passed a job offer to a friend who gave the offer consideration, but decided that they were better suited with their current direction. Indirectly related, I also found myself two years ago facing the same choice, and two years prior the same exact choice. In my case, I took the offer both times. I was newly married with very little bills and out of college. At that point taking a risk was not a bad choice, as it is now with multiple loans and a baby. Life makes risk harder to swallow.

XKCD 232

The assumption that I blindly jumped into the new jobs however, is way off target. The same approach has played out in my code development strategies. I may make what seems like a risky choice that later, pays off nearly every time. It’s not random. I saw the jobs and code requirements coming; because, I play chess.

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While recently using Scribd‘s services, I came across a very nasty bug, and a nice clean fix. Scribd allows developers to tap into a great, but somewhat basic API. One of these settings allows a developer to set a default ‘mode’ before the API then builds the flash calls necessary to display the document. The issue comes up when you choose the ‘slide’ mode as the loading view. No matter what ‘height’ you set, with ‘auto_size’ set to false, the height will adjust to the wrong height.

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I find myself at a crossroads. I really like using jQuery, and I really like not having to write my own plugins as there are some really good ones out there. But I have run into a problem when it comes to a notification system. Let’s take a step back and discuss the purpose for a minute.

Update 7/29/2009
I now have a page dedicated to this at http://www.alldorks.com/wordpress/notify where you can also find the source code repository.

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