Day 1 of “BCBS”:http://barcamp.org/BarCampBankSeattle was a whirlwind and honestly wore me out. (Hence I’m recapping in the morning and not last night.) It was my first BarCamp event in general and I have to say, I’m sold!

But even beyond the BarCamp experience, being trapped in a room all day with people that eat, sleep, drink, and breathe the financial industry is truly unique. I said it last night and I mention it in the sidebar of this blog, passionate people are awesome! They are contagious. For all the talk about how bad corporate cultures can become in the presence of a few bad people, I have think that just the presence of one of these people in an organization is culture changing and if you were lucky enough to have two I would expect nothing less than earthshaking innovation.

Well it’s off to Day 2!

It’s official, Brad and I are on a collision course with the first “BarCampBank”:http://barcamp.org/BarCampBank in the US, “BarCampBankSeattle”:http://barcamp.org/BarCampBankSeattle!

I’ve got so much to do to get ready for this thing that it’s stupid, so the post ends here.

I was knee deep in an old php form this week, trying to clean it up a bit, hiding and showing certain questions based on the responses of earlier questions. In addition this form had over 400 lines of JS validation that I had to turn on and off based on a questions visibility. Did I mention most of the fields and labels were stuck in a table?

(Ok…I can’t complain too much, it was marked up very nice and clean.)

So I’m hacking away at this validation and I need to only validate visible fields. So naturally I try something like this:

if($('fieldId').visible() && oldConditions) {
  throw an error;
}

Seemed pretty simple to me…until it wasn’t working. Fields that I could not see in my browser were still being validated. If I can’t see it, doesn’t that mean it is NOT visible.

According to prototype, I’m way off. The ‘visible’ method only tests THE SINGLE ELEMENT it is called on for the “style.display == ‘none’” without regard to that element’s ancestors. The problem was, my fields were visible, but the cells that contained them were not. What to do?

Extend prototpye of course! After a google and “a quick read of a short article”:http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/09/09/extend-prototype-dollar-yourself/ this is what I came up with:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  var visibleBoolean = element.visible();
  element.ancestors().each(function(el){ 
    if(!el.visible()) { visibleBoolean = false; }
  });
  return visibleBoolean;
};

Element.addMethods();

Quickly, it runs through an element’s ancestor’s checking them for visibility and then returning where the element can actually be seen or not. Now you can do $('elementId').truelyVisible() and get whether or not an element can actually be seen in the browser. Hope you enjoy!

PS. Looking at it a day later, it could probably be more efficient like this:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  var visibleBoolean = element.visible();
  if(visibleBoolean) {
    element.ancestors().each(function(el){ 
      if(!el.visible()) { visibleBoolean = false; }
    });
  }
  return visibleBoolean;
};

Element.addMethods();

PPS. It gets even better…I should blog code more often:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  return (element.visible() && !element.ancestors().any(function(el){ return !el.visible(); })) 
};

Element.addMethods();

There are not enough exclamation marks in the world to follow that title. I’m so happy to finally have this app up and running and waiting for the world to embrace it.

Ok…so it’s really not targeted at the whole world…just the world of Financial Institutions and their Risk Assessments. (But that’s still a good sized world!)

Check out the full announcement at: “blog.riskkey.com”:http://blog.riskkey.com

I hope to follow this launch with several posts about my experience over the last month in trying to push this thing to launch. Should be some fun JS, RoR, and UI discussion!

It’s been a while…almost a month…so I thought I do a quick update (in chronological order):

• My wife and I bought our plane tickets for our two week excursion to Europe this summer!

• My wife started a “personal blog”:http://markandshevawn.blogspot.com for us! This is great because 1) it gives me a appropriate space to post my “personal” stuff (like the Europe trip thing) and 2) she did it all my herself! I’m a proud nerd!

• I joined “The Garland Group”:http://www.thegarlandgroup.net as a full-time employee. We do IT audits and risk assessments in the wonderful world of banking. Most of my work will be centered around building software to make this process easier, more efficient, and more collobrative.

• I finally made it to a “Dallas.rb”:http://dallasrb.stikipad.com/wiki/ meeting (after showing up a whole day early) and a “Refresh Dallas”:http://www.refreshdallas.org/ meeting. I really enjoyed both and hope to make my attendance more regular.

So there’s the update. And now an announcement. I plan on moving this blog in a more development centered direction as a way to share the experiences I’m having at work and in code. So don’t be surprised to see a lot rails and javascripts posts. You have been warned :)

Just wanted to post a quick note letting everyone know (all my 2 subscribers) that I’m back from the whirlwind that is SxSW. I had great time and heard a lot of great panelists…all leaving me inspired and fired up about what I do!

Over the next few days I hope to recap some of my thoughts from the conference…but right now I’m still letting it all soak in.

Special thanks to “Brad Garland”:http://www.bradgarland.net for invitig me to go, serving as my unofficial SxSW tour guide, and driving us to Austin and back.

Just confirmed today that I’ll be at SXSW in Austin! I’ll have more to say about the whole thing later…but I’m pretty stoked about going!

Maybe I’ll see you there….

Public Apology: I would like to tell Adam Keys that I am sorry for skipping Dallas.rb for the second month in which I planned on attending. The mailing list confirms that it was, as always, a stellar meeting and I am a lesser person having missed it. We’ll see if April can remedy my skipping streak.

I spent my Thursday evening in the company of about 30 other like-minded fellows (and one like-minded lady) at “DemoCamp Dallas”:http://barcamp.org/DemoCampDallas1 that was hosted by “Sabre”:http://www.sabre.com/ out in South Lake. Not gonna lie…little skeptical going in…but I had a great time and highly recommend you come with me to the next one!

There were six presentations of all-working-software-no-slides goodness that I just ate up. I just get stoked seeing people apply software technologies in ways that never have crossed my mind! Anyways…I’ll stop getting all nerd-giddy over here and just say the presentations were awesome.

As this was also my first “community” event, I also got to meet some really cool people. I am really looking forward to getting out from behind my desk more and becoming involved with people and events like this.

Bottom Line: If you like software, go to the next “DemoCamp Dallas”:http://barcamp.org/DemoCampDallas1!

A Rails job to be exact. That’s right, after 18 months of freelancing and entrepreneurship I have decided to explore the options of full-time employment. I have very much enjoyed this past year and a half, but I also look forward to the new challenges that now lie before me.

I am currently looking for a Ruby on Rails job in the Dallas metroplex, so if you know anyone, feel free to pass my name along.

In conjunction with this search, I’ve set up a resume site at “resume.markmcspadden.net”:http://resume.markmcspadden.net. If you’ve ever wondered what I do or if you are just bored at work, go check it out and tell me what you think.

I’m excited about this next step and look forward to sharing it with all of you!