Priorities

19 Sep 2012

One of the unfortunate realities of being a college student is that I can’t work 24/7 on whatever. I have homework to do, classes to attend, a research position to hold and a myriad of other things clamoring for my attention. Usually this means that things fall through the cracks and in this case that I cut corners on something and came to regret it.

If you read my previous post, you will see me make reference to an animation embedded in the page. As of its writing, there was in fact a cellular automata embedded in this page’s HTML using a nigh-constant page refresh executed through JQuery. This is what is technically and colloquially referred to as “Doing It Wrong”. While functional and for nontechnical viewers attractive, the bottom line is such an animation technique is horrendously bandwith inefficient.

“But it’s not that bad”, you may say. Well.. you may not say that but I sure did last night before I looked at a bandwidth breakdown. In the course of one evening during which I showed this webpage to about a dozen people, I ate nearly a gigabyte of bandwith serving the animated subpage to my handful of visitors. Clearly, this model makes no sense.

After a senior developer I respect a lot told me I was doing it wrong in terms I won’t repeat here, I just worked some magic in Git and reverted the actual server back to my old static logo. It’s still not my favorite thing, but I think this site is professional enough that I’m still happy to feature it on my resume. And with a little luck I’ll get around to re-implementing that awesome animation in client-side JavaScript before anyone sees said updated resume at Career Fair…

With a little luck….