A promise to myself

12 December 2011

I have never been a person to set myself new years resolutions, and do not plan on doing so. I tend to set myself small goals now and again as a way of improving myself, or learning something new. It just so happens to be towards the end of the year, that I am setting this little goal for myself, well it’s not really a little goal, more of a way to improve my skill set.

I am not setting a deadline or a start date, as for me these never happen when I try to enforce a timescale on them, another reason is that these particular goals are hard to define deadlines upon.

What and Why?

The reason for this is mainly due to my day time job. As you may be aware, I am the sole web developer at Weesleekit, in Dumfries. By web developer, I like to refer to myself as a front-end developer. I take the designers mock-ups and transform them into content managed websites. 99% of the websites I build use some form of jQuery plugin, and 95% of them are slider plugins, while I would say I am quite proficient at jQuery I tend to using plugin’s to accomplish what I need, this due to the timescale I have to complete work and I tend to use the same few plugins as I know which ones are able to accomplish what the designers are after.

So, I am going to write my own slider plugin that I am able to use on real projects. I am going to make a list of the basic requirements and then build upon it over time. This will not only benefit myself, but also benefit the company.

You may ask why write another slider plugin when there are literally hundreds out there that are free to use, the main reason is to further my jQuery knowledge but I also prefer to use my own scripts than rely on other peoples work.

Along with writing my own slider plugin, I am also going to release it on Github, as I have been wanting to use GitHub but don’t have anything at the moment to put up.

I feel these two things go hand in hand with each other, also I get to take my jQuery knowledge to another level, and also learn how to use GitHub to put back into the community.

As you may have guessed it I will be blogging my progress here. Hopefully I can pass some useful information to others in the same situation as me. This will also lead me to creating more jQuery plugins and realising more stuff on GitHub over time