A Little Bit About Me

I've been a freelance website designer and developer for around 4 years now, as well as a computer techie with a love for tinkering for years before that. I'm a graduate of Southern Ontario's St. Clair College (Specifically, the Computer Networking Program), and was the Vice President-turned-CFO of the schools Information Technology Club for two of my three years at the college. I'm a standards complient developer, with my head (and the rest of my coding resources!) in the cloud. I currently live and work in Windsor, Ontario (Canada), and am currently employed as a Tech Support Specialist.

Have a web project? General Question? Tips for expanding my experience in Web Design or Development? Whatever the case, I'd love to hear from you! You can use this contact form to get a hold of me.

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Alex Watson's Corner of the Internet: Blog and Portfolio

BLOG: An Experiment with Frameworks, Part 2

Posted on 14 May 2012 | 1:54 am

This post is going to be a work in progress, as I've been extremely busy as of late.

DISCLAIMER: Anything said within this series of posts are observations made "at a glance" only. I have minimal experience with almost everything discussed, and this is only meant to be an observation from the standpoint of someone just getting into PHP/java frameworks for the first time.

Oh frameworks, how I love you. I'll admit, I was fairly apprehensive when I first started. Opening up a framework for the first time, seeing folder after folder of what seems like gibberish (at least, at my familiarity level with them at the time)... It made me wonder what the bloat to benefit ratio was. As time went on though, and as I learned more about what a framework had to offer, I realized that I didn't think I'd want to code without one again.

Why do I consider frameworks to be some sort of miracle cure? There are a few reasons, but I think the main one is layers. Imagine this. If you were working in an image editor, being able to have layers makes things significantly easier. You can edit piece by piece, instead of trying to work your way around each part when you want to fix something. So too does this apply to code. Now, to be fair, all of my experience currently sits with CodeIgniter (Symphony2 is my next project), and I've been told it has a bit of a "light" effect when it comes to how it deals with a lot of things. Regardless, seeing the separation between display (html) and backend code (php) is a huge help when it comes to simplicity of code. Rather than see a ton of mixed code, you can seen two sections that fit together very smoothly.

Now, to be fair, for those enterprising coders out there, I have no doubt that you could code your own methods to create this separation. However, having a framework simplifies what you need to do drastically, and frees your time for more important things. You know, like debugging that piece of code that just won't work at 3 in the morning.

BLOG: Moving Right Along

Posted on 14 March 2012 | 3:38 pm

I have the general theme for the blog pretty much done at this point. Some CSS3 styles, and colour. I also made two subtle but significant changes:

The contact form now works (sorry about that, that's what happens when you don't test before hand!), and has a reCaptcha field to boot. I was getting a TON of spam from that thing, so that's how I'm going to handle it.
Each post now has a comment count in the list view.

Next up is the portfolio page. Once I have that done, I'll probably do some work on the administration section, then I'll work on the tag system. Part of me also wants to change the code a little bit to be slightly more clean, but if I do that, it will be later, after everything is working.

BLOG: Assorted Commentary of a Twenty-One Year Old (part 1)

Posted on 13 March 2012 | 3:57 pm

First, an update on the site. Most of what I've been working on has been making the admin section more functional and pretty. I've gotten the edit functions all done in to blog, and I'm working on tidying up the Blog backend now. The blog makes me cringe a little bit at the moment, design-wise, but I'm sure by the time I'm done I'll be just as proud of it as I am the rest of the site.

I've done quite a few small websites in the past several years. Most of them I never really thought to add to my portfolio, and as such have been lost to time. That being said, while most of them probably weren't portfolio material, they did serve as excellent learning tools. I think that this site is the best possible outcome of those experiences at this point, and in all honesty, I'm extremely proud of my work. When I started this site, it was never my intention to create an ideal website. What I wanted to do was create a website that showcased as many possibilities as possible. Because of this, there's probably significantly more bloat than is really ideal. That's sort of the point, though.

On another note, I've been looking at possible projects I could do, other than a portfolio website. To that end, I've noticed that, while there are plenty of sites dedicated to how to play League of Legends, there aren't really any dedicated number-crunching websites. What I mean is that in any game, everything comes down to numbers. The person with higher numbers wins, or at least has a higher statistical chance to win, discounting raw skill. I'm a fairly regular player, and I've always been curious to try different item combinations on champions. For example, there are two main damage stats in the game. Ability Power, for making spells do more damage, and Attack Damage, for making attacks do more damage. Champions who use mostly Ability Power can certainly use Attack Damage, and be perfectly viable as well, but they won't ever reach their full potential. The same can be said in reverse. And while trying the above in a real game is certainly an option, considering that even matches against the game's programmed AI take upwards of 20 minutes, it would be significantly easier if a tool existed to generate the raw theorycraft behind the game.

I'm not expecting making such a tool to be easy, nor would I want it to be at this point. However I think it will be a fun project that gives me a chance to tie what I've learned into an application that affects other outlets as well.

BLOG: An experiment with frameworks

Posted on 13 March 2012 | 3:53 pm

I've been seeing a lot lately about how PHP is essentially the butt of the coding world. By that I mean, it has it's uses, but it's also not very pleasant to use. I've found sites supporting it (Example 1), and I've found sites that think it should die in a fire (Example 2). So which is right?

In whatever case (As I'm not trying to debate PHP vs. the World), I've found that a lot of people (read: Anyone with more experience than, say, me) swear by these things called frameworks. Bits of code that supposedly make things easier. jQuery, for those that don't know, is an example of this. So I decided to do my own experiments to decide if coding with a framework is worth it. Over the next few months, I'll be attempting to replicate my site using three different frameworks. In order, they are:

CodeIgniter, One of the PHP frameworks that comes highly recommended by the general internet population (read: Quite a few places you can reach by Google),
Symfony, Another PHP framework I've been told has been after the Glorious Coding Master Races, and
Spring, a Java framework that was suggested to me by the owner of the company I'm working for. I've worked with Java before, but I've always been curious to see how it holds up in a web setting.

I'll be documenting my experiences with each, and at the end of everything, I'll post raw data from each. I'll also post links to each site for anyone to follow along if they so choose.

In addition, I'll be switching from my normal IDE to Netbeans 7.1, to experiment with something other than Wiode and Notepad++. All the software I'll be using (save for Windows 7) is, to my knowledge, open source.

Let the games begin!

BLOG: New Header Deployed

Posted on 14 February 2012 | 3:46 pm

After getting some feedback on the old header, I used some suggestions to change it into what you see now. For now, the Social buttons (just LinkedIn, for now) are hidden, while I decide how the social button will display them. Once I get that, then it's on to getting a working search button!