STA Blog

Jake Engelberg

Jake Engelberg

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

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Today is my last day as an STA.

Terminator PNG Icon 30541 - Web Icons PNG

 

I’ve been apart of the team for 2 years, and it’s been actually awesome the entire time! Like, I wasn’t sponsored, paid, or REDACTED to say that! It’s been relaxed yet structured, and has allowed me to work on various projects that supplemented my CS studies in super beneficial ways. I didn’t end up taking any web related courses in my degree, but I was able to use what I knew and apply myself to learning new web frameworks and skills as I go. At my busiest, it was somewhat difficult to maintain work and school at the same time, but I can’t imagine a job to have during school with as many pros outweighing the cons other than being an STA.

Also, even though I started out in person, and it felt like FOREVER during the first semester. I ended up spending the majority of my time as a remote STA…which flew by in what felt like just another semester…and ended up being 2.5 semesters and 2 summers…thus is life.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done and grateful for the experience and great spirit from everyone I’ve met during my time.

My final project was my favorite, Epic Similes, in which I got to work tons in the backend of complex data handling and templating.

I stand on the shoulders of giants, the STAs before me, and of course Suloni and her magical handling of all of us…

and soon I will be revered as a giant whose people will stand on MY shoulders…

unless they become giants and then they aren’t people anymore? I guess that’s under the assumption that giants aren’t people…but frankly I don’t know if they are or not.

They aren’t even real, so I couldn’t get an answer via like evolutionary biology, unless a “giant” is a medical term for someone like 7″6′?

Which I’m not actually going to grow to that height, I guess I should be referring to giants in the context of fantasy fiction,
but then which fantasy world to I choose from in order to…….

Similes Dynamic Checkboxes

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I’ve been tasked with implementing dynamic search options, which will prune itself as you select more attributes. This makes it impossible to select a collection of attributes that isn’t even present. Right now, the implementation allows certain checkboxes to be hidden given other ones being checked. Right now, it’s a simple connection between two groups of checkboxes, but in the future mostly likely I will be running a search every time a checkbox is clicked. Then, I compile all the possible results given the current attributes and the values of checkboxes that aren’t present will be removed.

 

Here it is in action:

VLabs Navigation Redux!

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So I was requested to take a look at the VLabs site, mainly the navigation space. What we’ve noticed is that as content is added, things just don’t effortlessly handle themselves; overlapping section names and a navigation bar that takes up way too much space are the main culprits. Additionally, though, there are a variety of styling oddities or misaligned/unevenly spaced elements that were to be fixed as well. Here was the before:

 

 

And here is the after:

 

Centering/aligning things in HTML/CSS is actually a fair amount more involved than it looks. The nesting of elements is extremely important, and there a variety of ways to achieve the same result due to compatibility requirements that makes juggling the differences in styling also difficult. Another challenge in this project specifically was having to do this with Grav templates. As a CMS, Grav allows the creation of templates which multiple HTML pages will follow, as it dynamically pulls the content and then styles all pages the same. Syntax differs from regular HTML, and so I had to edit these templates to re-nest some elements such as the section title and the site logo together so that I could cleanly align them together below the labs. In the end, I learned a fair amount on editing these templates and gained more experience on elegant solutions to styling problems.

Hebrew Ruffle Conversions

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Finally, the actual Hebrew site has implemented the emulation of flash. I had to make a python script that adds the script and unifies sizing of the interactives (fullscreen), which went through and found about 400 different pages with flash, but now everything is where it was before, but emulated. Still ironing out compatibility issues (because this software is pre-release), but it is open source and updates daily so hopefully things work out fine. Regardless, it does a great job at removing other gross work that would have been done remaking these.

 

eLucy Responsiveness

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The current responsiveness of eLucy was somewhat there when I started working on it, but things were generally unaligned, and boxes where justified wrong with each other, along with uneven spacing or widths. A fair amount of work was put into equalizing these things.

Another aspect I had to implement for eLucy mobile responsiveness was the mobile’s hamburger menu. It existed, but no logic attached to it to actually work. Not sure how that actually happened, but I luckily the styling and HTML placement of the desktop navigation area wasn’t difficult to work with. I modified the style in mobile to that of a dropdown, and added some JavaScript logic to connect it to the button. Because the navigation bar is always visible in desktop but not in mobile, I also added logic when switching between mobile and desktop view (which happens when resizing window on a computer). However, I still need to catch an edge case, making mobile’s pulldown invisible on pageload.