Michael Richard Murphy

Luckily I’ve only looked for a new job a few times in my life. When I did, I read everything there was to read about the topic. Some of it was good advice, some of it was truly terrible advice. There was one thing however that I read over and over again. My dad beat this into my head as well.

Toot your own horn! Nobody else is going to do it for you.

I think those were my dad’s exact words. Tooting my own horn isn’t something I’ve ever been very comfortable with. When I even think about it, my head fills with the faces of all the pretentious windbags I’ve known. I guess there’s a fine line between tooting and bragging and I prefer to err on the side of caution. Anyhow, that brings me to the point of this post.

Today The Student Loan Corporation held their quarterly employee recognition celebration and the web application I’ve written plays a big part in it. Because of all my hard work and the wonderful job I did on the application, I received two awards today.

The first is called The People’s Choice. This award requires approval at the Director level and was presented to me by Mike Reardon, CEO and Chairman of the Board. Only 7 other employees received this award this quarter. I was nominated by the project sponsor and here is the text of the award:

Mike came into our business at a critical time in our project. We gave him our requirements and an aggressive date for implementation. Mike reveiwed the BRD and developed a prototype for the team to review. As we went along some of our requirements changed and became more complex. Mike always remained calm and came back to the team with a quality product. This was all completed within our timeframe to implement. Mike has given 110% to getting Great Performances back up with all of the enhancements. Feedback from our users has been fantastic. They appreciate the ease in using the site and the new reporting functionality. It has been a pleasure working with Mike on Phase 1. I look forward to completing Phase 2.

The other award goes to teams whose projects have had a significant impact on the business and my teammates and myself received this award for our work on the employee recognition program.

Along with certificates and some financial appreciation comes company-wide fame. Not to bad for my first quarter at the company.

There’s no i in team however, so as long as I’m taking credit, I’d like to give some as well. Thanks to everybody on the team for volunteering their time and doing a wonderful job. Especially Jaime who’s attention to detail and organizational skills have kept us on track and JC for being so good at his job. His thorough requirements gathering has made my job easyier.

Now let’s talk about what I can do at your company:

• Get my contact information and resume

I’m no security zealot but I was definitely shocked today when I created an online learning account for work and received a confirmation email that contained my username, password, and detailed instructions on logging in (including the URL of the application). But my recognition application was required to be locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Heaven forbid some some Citibank emblazoned prizes fall into the wrong hands.

that I’m number 2 on Google for the search term i love mike murphy.

I found that as a search string in my stats. At first I didn’t believe it but it’s true. Try it.

I was originally going to tell you how this book I’ve been reading, Ajax in Action by Dave Crane and Eric Pascarello with Darren James, has made me a Javascript phenom and how I’m putting together amazingly interactive interfaces using Ajax.

Instead, I’ll just tell you how Yahoo!’s Developer Network has pre-built interfaces and design patterns. All open source under BSD license. Want to implement drag n’ drop functionality? How about breadcrumbs or pagination? Auto-complete? Look no further, it’s all there. Quite a few of these have sparked my interest and will no doubt save time on future projects.

I’ll probably still finish the book however.

Whenever I begin work on a new project, I have three files that I always turn to: an XHTML document, a CSS file, and a Javascript file. The XHTML document is a blank canvas but the important part is that it contains a valid doctype declaration and links to the CSS and Javascript files.

Relatively recent articles by Mike Stenhouse at Content with Style and Faruk Ate? at KuraFire Network discussed and published their CSS “starter” files so I figured why shouldn’t I do the same? My CSS file actually comes from Faruk’s orginal (mentioned here) but now updated with the improvements he mentions in his most current post. You can download my template site which includes a valid XHTML “starter”, CSS, and Javascript files.

Update: A while back I added the line-height property to my CSS declarations after reading somewhere that giving elements a line-height slightly larger than the text size gave text more breathing room. I can confirm that this produces more legible, more professional looking copy. I read recently however on Eric Meyer’s site that I hadn’t been implementing this in the best fashion. I’d been specifying line-height in terms of ems which computes line-height based on the font-size of the element. This is fine and dandy for the element itself but any descendants inherit the computed line-height of the element rather than calculating their own. It appears that the best manner is to specify a unitless line-height which passes the number on to descendants as a sort of multiplier from which each descendant calculates its own line-height. So, my base CSS file has been updated to use a unitless line-height declaration.

Raise your hand if you’ve never had to look for a job….That’s what I thought.

You’re probably all too familiar with the saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Conversely, it’s also been said, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you”. I think successful networking is a little bit of both.

Since I’ve stumbled across two great articles about networking lately, I wanted to link to them and throw in some comments of my own. Since my job at the pizza shop way back in high school is the only job I’ve ever gotten without being referred by somebody, I know how important networking can be.

Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of Schmoozing” discusses the ground rules for effective networking. I am consistently wowed by Guy’s writing and this post is no different. As an ex-Apple exec turned venture capitalist, Guy knows what it’s like to be schmoozed. Read his tips and you’ll be a better networker for it.

See the section on Face Time at Christopher Hawkin’s web site for details on how he used networking to start and grow a business in a town where he knew no one. All it took is a little legwork and some careful listening.

Back in July, I wrote about LinkedIn, a professional networking site, after I read about it in the career section of the local paper. The gist of the newspaper article is that more and more companies are turning to referrals in order to get quality candidates rather than online job sites such as Monster, HotJobs, etc. You know the drill, you find a posting online and you’re one button click away from exiling your resume to the abyss along with 100,000 other applicants using the site. LinkedIn allows users to cultivate a network of trusted colleagues who, ideally, they would have no problems referring to other users. I’ve made tons of great professional contacts in this manner.

Both of the articles above mention something that I think is important enough to be worth mentioning again. Networking is not about what someone can do for you but what you can do for them. Be generous. Favors come back a thousand fold. Becoming a valuable resource for someone is the surest way to open doors to all sorts of opportunities you can’t even imagine now.

The beta version of Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download. I downloaded it moments ago and am actually writing this post using it.

The first thing I did was check out this site which surprisingly looks almost the same in IE 7 as it does in Firefox. That makes me happy. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised since this is a relatively simple layout that doesn’t use a lot of the hacks older versions of IE required that now supposedly render funky in IE 7.

My first impression is that they copied things people like about Firefox, like tabbed browsing. Next they made some necessary changes such as better support of standards and security features.

I haven’t used it for more than a few fleeting moments but I just can’t see myself switching from my beloved Firefox with it’s variety of themes and indispensable extensions. Plus, there’s a lot of bad blood between myself and IE after countless hours troubleshooting problem layouts that render perfectly in other browsers. On the other hand, Internet Explorer still dominates the market share and as a developer, there’s no way around it so this is a certainly a step in the right direction.

Although I haven’t really used it, Technorati generates a lot of referrals for this site so I decided to go poke around over there. When I did, I found that by ‘claiming my blog’, I can include additional information about me or this site when my URLs are returned in a query. Supposedly there are other features available to those that claim there blogs as well. This post is part of the registration process so I’ll let you all know how it works out when I’m finished.

In the meantime, here is the Technocati profile for letsgomurphys.com.

Implementation Day!

We finally went live with the application I’ve been writing at Citigroup. The project had been delayed after some production issues over the weekend. People seemed slightly disappointed as expectation has been building since before I came onboard. There was a lot of fanfare today with balloons and posters and little freebie gifts for everybody. Much more hoopla than I’m used to or prefer.

All in all the program was well received and people seemed to enjoy using it. A minor bug surfaced but out of roughly 200 or so users today only 3 trouble tickets were issued and they were all related to the same defect. 1.5% isn’t too shabby for the ‘fng’.

The project sponsor has been talking this application up to the whole company since I started so the pressure has really been on to deliver. It also didn’t help that I’m new to the team so my performance here would really make or break my reputation. Like I said, things went well and we got tons of positive feedback. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep tonight…for a change.

A while ago I read an article in Wired about a traffic engineer who removed all the traffic signs from a village in Holland. No street signs, no lane markers, no crosswalks, not even markers to indicate where the road stops and sidewalks begin. What residents found is that it reduced accidents because without any explicit direction, people were more focused on the task at hand, mainly driving. It interested me at the time but it also seemed pretty idealistic to trust people to pay attention. I filed this nugget away in my brain and promptly forgot about it until Jason Fried posted about it over at 37signals.com.

What does any of this have to do with web design? I think the point Jason made and I’d like to reiterate is that less is sometimes more. Have you heard about the million dollar homepage? It was thought up by an English lad as a way to pay for school. Basically he divided up his homepage into a million pixels and sells them to advertisers for a $1. While it’s got him rolling in cash, looking at it is enough to trigger a seizure. It’s a great gimmick for sure but there’s way too much going on.

Users can get overwhelmed by information so before you put pad to pen, think about the purpose of your design. What do you want from the user? Look at Blogger’s home page. I think they’ve narrowed it down to two main reasons why someone would visit their site: 1. An existing user wants to use their account. Good, the login area is featured prominently at the top of the page. 2. A potential new user wants information and/or to sign up. Again, the necessary information is displayed right smack in the middle of the page. That’s pretty much it. Simple and elegant. Even the dimmest bulb could figure out how to login or where to click to create a blog.

Cameron Moll had a great article on breaking a design down to only the necessary elements. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it on his site when I went to write this but if you troll his archives you just might get lucky. Derek Powazek has also written a great piece at A List Apart about home page goals and how to design to meet them. The moral of the story is that complexity or features don’t necessarily make something better. There’s a reason KISS rocks.

Editor’s Note: You can also find this published on fad.tastic’s home page.