Broken Links

Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston

tips - Broken Links Archive

On the uncanny valley & creating prototypes

The uncanny valley is a term from the world of robotics, which states that when something appears almost perfect, it can cause a negative reaction*. Or, to be more precise:

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.

Source: Wikipedia

I’m talking about the uncanny valley in regards to creating prototypes, so revulsion may be too strong a term; but I think the principle still applies.

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How to apply for a web development job

The company I work for has a lot of SMB websites to produce over the next three or four months so we’re looking for a client-side developer to come in and help us out for a short term. I placed an ad on a few websites with details of what we’re looking for, and waited for the applications to come in.

When they did, I was shocked. The majority of them were terrible. From the introductory email to the CV to the examples provided, only one or two were good enough for consideration.

To pass on advice to prospective job seekers (and hopefully make my job a little easier in future), here are five tips for applying for a job in web development:

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Five essential CSS tips from top developers

The October 2007 issue of the UK web development magazine .net has an interesting feature this month where web professionals share their favourite tips for coding CSS. Here are the five tips, with links to read more about them.

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Aside

As part of .Net magazine’s Responsive Week, I’ve updated an article by Denise Jacobs to now bring you 50 fantastic tools for responsive web design.

[#] 1 Comment . More Asides.

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