Tag: tech

More Web Dev Projects

Carl Setzer2 Comments
data codes through eyeglasses

I didn’t post yesterday, so I’ll post about the project I did yesterday and the one I did today. Yesterday, the project was for an Animated Countdown timer. Using CSS and JavaScript to create this animation was pretty cool. My consternation came from a bunch of mistyped elements in my code. Finding those little glitches (like typing “igm” vs “img”) gets wearying after awhile.

Today’s project was an Image Carousel. I only made one code error, but it was a sneaky one. The images would not sit well in their frame. Turns out, I tried to set the size to 500px, but I had a stray “1” in there (1500px…opps). Once I found that, viola!

These are rather small projects, where I’m mostly trying to refresh my understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I want to be far better than I am, even if I don’t end up becoming a coder. I really enjoy this and want to grow.

I also am working on Google’s IT Support Professional and Project Management certificates. Both of these are valuable skills, and useful things to understand regardless of role in IT.

Sigh…”Job Cuts in Big Tech Continue Unabated”

Carl Setzer
code projected over woman

The news about big tech’s layoff woes are hard to miss. In my feed today came this article: “Job Cuts in Big Tech Continue Unabated“. Yeah, more glum news for those of us trying to make a career in tech right now. I really appreciate Sheharyar’s insights into what’s going on. Things like:

  • “The last commonly held belief for layoffs was that businesses hired way too aggressively during the COVID-19 pandemic…”
  • “artificial intelligence has now sparked a demand for professionals that can tame the beast and help make products that companies can then sell to others, or, just make them better at what they do. Hiring specialized professionals isn’t cheap, so of course, companies are letting go of people that don’t necessarily possess the skills that they’re looking for while bringing on those that do”
  • More succinctly “while some jobs are being made redundant, others are springing up all the time.”

Big tech companies don’t seem to be struggling, though.

  • “Meta’s results stood out, so much so that its stocks jumped a whopping 20%…”
  • “Over at Alphabet, the Google parent saw Q4 revenue of $86.31 billion, up 13% year over year…”
  • “Apple posted quarterly revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2% year over year…”
  • “Microsoft….booked an 18% year over year increase in quarterly revenue to $62 billion…”
  • And Amazon? Their “Q4 net sales increased 14% to $170 billion while net income increased to $10.6 billion…”

This all reinforces the notion that tech has simply overhired. The video below talks about that, too.

Of course, the billion dollar question is “how long will this last?” At what point do we expect these thousands of tech workers to get re-assimilated into the machine? Late in 2023, I was hearing pundits predict that 2024 was going to see the end of layoffs and a rebound in hiring. Well, that hasn’t happened…not yet, at least. Of course, we’re only two months in.

Also, I think that the notion of specializing might be less than optimal for your tech career. Building out as much complimentary skill as you can seems to be wise. And, in the short-term at least, developing skills with AI seems a solid bet for finding employment. Will AI find itself in the dust bin of the latest hypecycle? Hard to say, though it’s stayed the course stronger than crypto and Web 3.0.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

More Tech Sector Layoffs

Carl Setzer2 Comments
man in white shirt using macbook pro

Yesterday, I came across this video from an HR guy I follow.

Then I read this article this morning about more layoffs, specifically at Google.

Google Cuts Hundreds of Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

So, even more layoff pain in the tech sector as we launch into 2024. My heart goes out to my friends at Google, Meta, and Amazon. It’s a hard time to be in tech.

I wonder when we’ll see a rebound. I’ve seen some guesses about later this year, or 2025. That’s really hard to guess. It will, I’m sure. But what will the economy look like when that happens?

What I’m confident in, though, is that the market has changed and keeping up on those changes will be critical. I need to proactively manage my career. Which is a bit intimidating, but also liberating.

Anyway, onwards.

Do search algorithms have a sense of humor?

Carl Setzer2 Comments
close up photo of cat with its eyes closed

Yesterday I set up a YouTube livestream and, as part of that, needed to whip out a thumbnail. Canva is my go-to tool of choice for such work. As this is for a preschool choir, I searched templates for “youtube children choir”, and THIS shows up in the results:

I found this…fascinating…and absolutely hysterical. Maybe the global AI is just trying to brighten my day.

Thinking and Re-Thinking Domains

Carl Setzer
close up shot of a typewriter

Now, though, as I’ve spent so much time becoming a web developer, and have built my own page over at GitHub, I think it would be great to have domain that ties in with that work. So, CarlSetzer.com has been a blog for ages. The whole thing started over at Blogger, then I ported the domain over the WordPress years ago. And it’s a WordPress site to this day. So, with those two things, I’m wondering what I should do regarding domains.

Should I create a new domain, say CarlSetzer.blog for this site and use CarlSetzer.com as a hand coded and tech/professionally focused site? I have a hundred business cards coming with CarlSetzer.com as the address, so it makes a lot of sense to shift the blog. Plus, it has solid SEO with my name.

So, what do you think? Change this here blog to CarlSetzer.blog and make CarlSetzer.com into more of a business/tech thing? Or register CarlSetzer.io or something like it for the tech-biz side of my life? I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Learnings from spending the evening troubleshooting Microsoft Office on a new MacBook

Carl Setzer
abstract apple art black and white

A friend of mine has one of the latest MacBook pros. It is a rather lovely machine! But it had a weird glitch when we tried to install Office. It threw this error:

“The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.”

A remarkably unhelpful message, if I say so myself. First guess: corrupted download file. So I deleted the pkg file (it’s the Mac software installation package), redownloaded it, attempted to reinstall it, and got the same error.

Ok, delete the pkg file again, empty the trash, rebooted, downloaded it again, started the installation, got the SAME error message. Now I’m puzzled. So, time to google it. And, bless the google gods, I found this quickly.

Solution for “The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail”

I was a bit suspicious, though, when the answer was a link to another site.

Control access to files and folders on Mac

However, this was spot on. It was a rather simple issue. I needed to grant access to the download folder to the Installer. Just a few commands to enter and, boom, Office was able to install.

  1. Choose Apple menu
  2. System Settings, then click Privacy & Security
  3. In the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down) click Files and Folders.
  4. For each app in the list, turn the ability to access files and folders in specific locations on or off. In this case, “Installer”

I hope you don’t have this issue, but if you do, may this grant you peace after your frustrations.

50 Projects in 50 Days: Day 3

Carl Setzer5 Comments

Completed day 3 of the 50Projects in 50Days course, “rotating navigation”. This one rotates the whole page if you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left. Hard to imagine a use case, but it’s really fun.

I’ve been posting these to my recently re-done Github site. Again, I’ve done three of these:

With Expanding Cards, when you click on individual cards, they expand out, and the other ones shrink. For Process Steps, it’s like a progress indicator. Each time you press the “next” button, the line advances one over. And for Rotating Navigation, when you click on the hamburger icon, the web page rotates, showing the navigation buttons. For me, this is fun stuff. Which is good since it’s now 9:30 at night and I still haven’t eaten dinner yet.

Anyway, it feels good to refresh my knowledge and build out these skills. I feel it’s a critical part of my march into a tech career. Plus, the internet and web development are the future of tech. I intend to do one project per day every day, but we’ll see. I have a few things coming up that may cause a day or two to be lost. But I should have not problem keeping this moving forward.

Wish me luck!

Finished, and Next Steps

Carl Setzer1 Comment
information sign on shelf

I just finished my final in Enterprise Architecture. By successfully completing this class, I’ve completed the requirements for some additional certificates:

I also have applied for the following certificates:

I’m done being a student for the near term, but I think I’ve accomplished a lot during these past 2.5 years. I’m proud of all I’ve done and look forward to finding ways to implement all I’ve learned.

Another goal is to land a full-time role with a company that will pay for me to continue my studies. There’s so much more to learn! I plan to start a new role sometime around the end of this year, and then be able to start classes with that company in 2023.

My Work Over The Next Few Months

Carl Setzer1 Comment
top view photo of people near wooden table

In my current role, I’m preparing to cover for our communications coordinator while he’s out on paternity leave. This will last through November, and my contract is up at the endo of December.

I covered for him 2 years ago on his last leave, so I know quite a bit about the work (check out samples of that work here). Last round, though, we were at the beginning of the pandemic, so my main focus was on creating and editing video for our services. This round, our video production needs are minimal (we’re fully back in person and streaming. Not much video editing at all). Though we’re launching a stewardship campaign, which will have a video component, we’re outsourcing that. Most of this round’s work will be newsletter maintenance and bulletin creation. I’ll also be doing social media work, some graphic design, and some writing. It’ll be fun.

This gives me pause. I’m good at communications work. The main reason I chose to study web development grew out of comms. I get consulting work for my comms and marketing knowledge. Yet, I also love more general tech. I really enjoyed my Cisco networking classes, the hardware classes, and my current Enterprise Architecture class. Of course, more traditional IT work seems to pay better. And there is a lot of competition for communicator roles, especially with all the changes in journalism careers.

So, I’m not sure what will come of all this. Will I try to leverage my experience in this contract role into a FTE comms role somewhere? Or do I want to be straight tech? Or is there something else I haven’t seen yet? Oh, the mystery of life!

Cybersecurity Podcasts

Carl Setzer
person in black hoodie hacking a computer system

Cybersecurity is not a main focus of mine, but it is something that I have an interest in: it impacts my work as a web developer and project coordinator. Earlier today a friend and I had a brief discussion about the news. We both stated we get much of our tech news via podcasts. Then we had the idea of creating a list. So, here is the summation of our brief discussion.

If you have ideas or additions, please let me know. I’ll update this list as I discover more.