Hi, I’m Brian Warren. I work at Happy Cog. When I’m not making websites, I like to make beer and shoot photos. I live in Philadelphia with my awesome family.
My good friend Dan switched to Tumblr, did a handsome, responsive redesign, and explains his thinking in this post. His reasons for switching to Tumblr and his thoughts on his current in-process redesign/rejiggering mirror mine and what’s going on here to a T.
It’s trash day. Which means I’m locked out of the office.
You see, on most mornings, I eat breakfast, gather my things together, get my iPhone and headphones, and then kiss my family goodbye before leaving the house. Today, it’s trash day. So I do all of those things, but I leave out the back door so I can take the trash to the curb. All of that is well and good; however, I always keep my keys on a cabinet by the front door, and pick them up on the way out. So, today, leaving out the back door, I left my keys at home.
I take the trolley to work, so this isn’t a mistake I realize when I get to my car or scooter. It’s a mistake I realize after getting to our office building, grabbing the three packages that were delivered last night, toting said packages upstairs to the office, and finding I’m the first one there and can’t unlock the door.
I headed downstairs to pick up a latte and get to work at a table there. Delicious. Bonus: Our office wifi reaches down to the cafe.
I think I’ll forget my keys more often, at least on trash days.
On May 28th, my son, James Baden Warren, was born. We are so thrilled to start getting to know this guy. It was a crazy fast labor, and he was a couple weeks early, so all of this came as a pretty fast surprise! We’re not complaining. He’s awesome.
My first ever article on EE Insider was published today. It goes in depth on how to use one seemingly simple technique using Pages to simplify how content works on a website. I’m excited to write for EE Insider and I hope I can do a bit more of that in the future. I say that knowing full well I have other writing projects on my plate and a baby due in three weeks (!), so we’ll see how much of that I can do in the short term. In the meantime, enjoy this article.
If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript? … Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Here’s a cute shot of Bridget at Dock St. Brewing.
Really enjoying Hipstamatic.
In March, I traveled to Austin for SXSW. For whatever reason my experience at SXSW felt a lot more low key than in years past. This is a bit strange because this year was the biggest SXSW ever, and I had far more stuff to do than ever before.
In what is undoubtedly now a yearly tradition, Happy Cog threw an enormous karaoke party entitled “Cogaoke”. We pulled out all the stops this year with more contestants, more judges, more sponsors and a longer open bar.
It’s funny because I don’t really get into karaoke at all. It’s not something I seek out or make time for. Nonetheless, it’s downright impossible to not enjoy the spectacle that is Cogaoke.
We don’t just put on a party though. It’s a competition for which people are preparing months in advance. We started back in January by putting up a teaser site and in February we debuted the full site with contestant registration. Meanwhile we were making training videos, teaching people how to put on the most amazing performance they can.
It was a huge deal that entailed lots of extra work for the whole office. I enjoyed working on the whole project, getting to do design as well as front-end and back-end development. Fun stuff.
The event itself went off without a hitch. I didn’t do a ton during the event, except for fire a confetti canon and run drinks to judges. Check out photos from the event at the Cogaoke 2010 Flickr photo pool.
The other enormous undertaking of SXSW for me was getting to give at talk at our “ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination!” panel. Kenny Meyers led the panel, which was comprised of Ryan Irelan, Jenn Lukas, Mark Huot, and of course, me. Quite the crew!
We spent a decent amount of time before SXSW planning our talk, but nothing was a substitute for meeting and going through it in person, which we did a few times while at SXSW, before the main event.
I somehow found time before leaving for Austin to rehearse the crap out of my little talk, and if there’s any little bit of advice I can give to a budding speaker, it’s to do just that. Get extremely comfortable with both your routine and your slides. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but the one bit of feedback people gave me the most was that everything seemed really polished and I seemed nice and comfortable talking. The only thing I can attribute that to is the extra time I spent going over everything. The last thing you want to do is get stuck reading your slides.
Our talk was about ExpressionEngine 2.0, an app we use as the content management system for lots of our sites. It wasn’t a commercial for the app itself, it was more a talk for people who make sites, like we do, with ExpressionEngine. I was a little surprised, but a lot of people in attendance hadn’t used it yet, and were just finding out about ExpressionEngine.
My portion of the talk was about Accessories, a new feature in ExpressionEngine 2.0. I posted the slides from my talk to my site for download here
How did it go? It went really, really well. The ballroom was packed, the Q&A went great, and Kenny did a fantastic job of getting some good laughs from the crowd. After our talk, folks from EllisLab (the makers of ExpressionEngine) took us out for lunch, which was a super nice treat.
SXSW was really fun this year. I’m tempted to say it was the most fun year yet for me. As usual, I didn’t get a chance to see everybody I wanted to, but that’s just how it goes. I’m very glad Mr. Balmer finally made it out. And of course, lots of quality time was spent getting coffee in the morning, and pints in the evening with such fine chaps as Mr. Boms, Mr. Dorny, and Mr. Van Damme and somewhere in the middle spending some time at my new favorite place in Austin, Frank.
For obvious reasons, Art in my Beer might be my new favorite site. I submitted this shot to them shortly after they debuted earlier today. It’s from a batch of homebrew I made a few years ago.
I posted some photos from SXSW to Flickr. I might have averaged more shots this year than last, but that’s not saying much.
