Cameron Moll posted on LinkedIn that Authentic Jobs was celebrating its 18th birthday today. Cameron started Authentic Jobs in 2005 and then later sold it in 2016. At one point, it was the go-to place to find jobs for Web creatives.
I applied for the front-end developer job for Authentic Jobs at the beginning of 2012. I had a delightful interview with Cameron, whom I had met in person and had lunch with at a conference in 2007. I did not get the job but was told I was in the final cut. I lacked some of the skills that he was looking for.
I used this as motivation to acquire those skills during 2012 which I believe prepared me to pursue a role later in the year that moved me to Chattanooga. I applied for that job through Authentic Jobs. I was introduced to LGND in 2017 by responding to a posting on Authentic Jobs. I am grateful for the impact that this site has had on my career. In total, it connected me to 3 opportunities between 2012 and the present.
I played a crazy game of MLB The Show 23 last night. I am about a month and a half into a Franchise season with the Rays. My offense has not been great. I am only scoring about 2-3 runs per game. My pitching has been great so it has kept me in contention.
Last night, I took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the seventh against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Both my runs were courtesy of Brandon Lowe solo homers. Lowe has struggled with a sub .200 average. But he was hitting them last night. I blew the lead with the Yankees scoring a run in both the 7th and 8th inning to tie.
In the ninth, I got an unexpected homer from Harold Ramirez, who leads my team in hits and RBIs but had only a couple of homers. So I took the one run lead to the ninth and my closer, Peter Fairbanks blew his 3 straight saves (after going 9-9 before that in saves).
But then I homered in the top of the eleventh with the lead off batter of Francisco Mejia (who has come through with some key hits and homers this year) and took a two run lead (extra innings start with a man on second) only to blow it again in the bottom of the 10th. An error by Lowe led to one of those runs.
In the eleventh, Randy Arozarena homered to lead off of the inning and then Brandon Lowe came through with his third home run of the night to give me a bit more breathing space. The Yankees managed to put one across but I was able to shut them down and claim the 8-6 victory.
An explosion of offense in the last three innings and six homers allowed me to split the series with the Yankees and gave me some hope that my offense might start to come alive.
Brandon Lowe is one of my favorite Rays both in-real-life and in this game. I enjoyed playing with him and the team in MLB The Show 20 and won the World Series.
I replaced my LGND desk pad (2019) with a new one yesterday. I decided to celebrate my college spirit and opted for a Kansas Jayhawk-themed one. It brightens up my desk space with crimson and blue.
“A course to help you learn how to wrangle your stylesheets, keeping them organized and scalable no matter the size of the project or how big your team is.
“..I want to teach you how you can leverage modern CSS, and some of those other tools to create well-organized, and easy-to-scale projects that actually leave you and your team writing less CSS.”
I am interested to learn from Kevin and think about how I could employ new strategies and tools to improve my workflow.
Kevin is a great teacher and I have enjoyed his videos over the past few years. I also bought another of his courses, CSS Demystified. I worked through this first module of that course and really liked it. But I put it down and need to get back to it in the near future.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Pine Tar Game. The Pine Tar Game was played between bitter rivals, the Kansas City Royals and New York Yankees. George Brett hit a 2-run home off Goose Gossage in the ninth inning to give the Royals a one-run lead.
Billy Martin argued that Brett had pine tar too far up the bat. The rule he referenced had nothing to do with performance but had been added because teams didn’t want to replace balls dirtied by the substance. Brett was called out but an appeal to the American League office overruled the umpire’s decision and the game’s final 4 outs were played on August 18.
I remember watching the end of that game at my grandfather’s house. We used to visit him on Sunday afternoons. I remember being so excited to see Brett homer again off of Gossage at Yankees’ Stadium. He had homered in Game 3 of the 1980 ALCS that propelled the Royals into their first World Series. Then I was so upset that the umpire called him out and the Royals lost.
I read a book this year, The Pine Tar Game by Filip Bondy. It was written by a New York sports writer. It had some great background information about the rivalry and the rule that was at the center of it all. It was one of the craziest incidents in baseball. And it was personal to me because I was a Royals fan and watched the game.
I started a new project today and built my first custom React block for WordPress using what I learned in the WordPress Block Creator Course that I have been working through the past two weeks. I still need to build out the render template for the front end but it has gone smoothly so far.
Most of the obstacles that I encountered today were using the custom starter theme that my teammate Ross created last week. He is out of the office this week so it is not as easy to ask him questions when they come up. But he has been fairly responsive.
Most of the issues were a matter of me getting familiar with how he set things up. I may go back and add and delete things that are helpful to me in building a theme and how I structure my projects. I am sure day two will be a bit smoother as I become more familiar with how the theme is set up. Exercising the team value of bringing a growth mindset.
My son linked me to this site, probably for the content because he is a graphic design student. I really like how they are using horizontal scrolling to tell the story. I like how the Gallery sections scale in and out. A very interesting storytelling technique using scroll animations.
I am wondering if you could do the same thing but have the content be in that container that scales up. I may have to build a Codepen to see if I could pull something like that off.
Today is my 15th anniversary since I joined Twitter. It was not as meaningful to me this year as I used it less and I mourn what it has become.
It use to be such an important place for me to connect to the Web community (web practitioners). I connected with a lot of great people over the years. But a lot of those people have left and it is no longer a valuable resource to me.
I still pop in once in a while. It still helps me to keep up with some of my favorite sports teams and there are still some people posting to the platform that I care about.
It was also the place where I started using the moniker of “webcraftsman.”
