I am a Chicago based web programmer that focuses on usability and beautiful code; More about me

iPad

Ok so almost every blogger anywhere has written something about the iPad so I figured now is the perfect time for me to write my thoughts about it! There are countless articles on why the iPad is the next best thing or the worst thing ever for Apple. I don't really want to talk directly about the iPad v1 I want to talk about what the iPad means for personal computing at the consumer level. There have been some really interesting articles that have covered this topic notably Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky's podcast #82 and Jeff Croft.

If we can move past all the arguments about the hardware and lack of features we are left with the logic behind Apples choices for the iPad. Apple clearly cares very deeply about user experience, thats a pretty obvious fact. However many people look at the iPad and see it as a contradiction to that ethos. I also first thought the same thing. I was very disappointed and literally laughed when they announced it. I thought "This is the thing that has so much hype and Steve Jobs said was the most important thing he had ever done?". However after ...

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Why do I use Object Oriented Programming

Published on February 3, 2010 by Ben Mills Read full entry...

A few weeks ago I was asked what I thought was a very easy question, why do I use object oriented programming (OOP)? My immediate answer was "to keep my code clean and easy to update". But I realized that I was just repeating what I have been heard in my programming classes and various other programming contacts, I had not really thought through the use of OOP myself.

Actionscript Thoughts

Published on December 3, 2009 by Ben Mills Read full entry...

Working with a lot of Actionscript projects lately I've been thinking how to improve my AS3 development setup so that I can not using Flash.app or Flex and stick with what I know, TextMate and Terminal. I also talk about the problems I'm having trying to integrating test driven development into my professional projects. Finally I review a 'design pattern' that I've been using a lot in my most recent AS3 project.

Practical Beautiful Code

Published on November 8, 2009 by Ben Mills Read full entry...

For my birthday this year my wonderful girlfriend gave me the book Beautiful Code. It is a collection of extremely well written and efficient snippets of code that are analyzed by the developer who wrote them or were involved with them. The goal of the book is for the reader to understand how and why each master coder solved the problem they are faced with. So far I’ve absolutely loved the book even though a good part of the actual code goes over my head.

App Development, Ideas

Published on October 21, 2009 by Ben Mills Read full entry...

Some ideas and thoughts about trying to build my own apps and why I seem to come up with ideas. Specifically for time tracking / billing and studding.

About

I am a Chicago based web developer about to graduate college from Columbia who also likes to dabble in UI design. I enjoy building all kinds of web applications in all types of languages. When coding I try to follow the DRY philosophy as best I can as well as making my web sites as semantic as possible. More about me.

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