Finding value in side projects
By philhawksworth 21 Jun 2011.
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In the development team here at The Team, we rarely have down time. That's just life at a busy agency. Lots of clients, lots of projects, little spare time. We do however try our best make time for exploring new technologies and working on little side projects to scratch our various itches. (We're not an itchy bunch by nature. We just have active imaginations!)
I'm a big believer in the value of down time for discovering new techniques, learning new technologies and simply just making something that we really, really want.
Over the last few days Jake, one of our development team, was getting a bit bored of the amount of number crunching he needed to do to create the CSS for some pretty complex sprite sheets on a site we are building for a client. This process involved a lot of pixel counting to figure positions and dimensions of particular parts of a sprite sheet. As is the way of many good developers who are faced with a repetitive and time consuming task, Jake decided to cheat. Rather than go through this laborious process for this and every other future project, he chose to build himself a utility to discover the details from his sprite sheet and generate the CSS that corresponded.
This took a little time. Not a lot, because he's uber-speedy and know's his stuff, but with the creation of that alone, Jake saved himself considerable headaches and time on most future projects. He went a bit further though, and recognising that others would find this useful too, created a simple website to provide this tool to one and all. A little help from the other guys in the development team and the site was compressed, optimised, deployed and hosted using our automated deployment process.
The response to spritecow.com (you'll have to buy me a beer to get me to reveal how the name came about) has already been excellent, with many people talking about it on Twitter and proclaiming how useful it will be to them. There are one or two rather clever tricks happening with Javascript and Canvas to discover the dimensions of images and generate the CSS, so Jake has also shared the code on Github so that others can see under the hood.
