Jesse Schibilia

I went to my very first job interview today.  The interview was for a junior technician position at a small networking company in Central Jersey.  I came away from it feeling very positive about the company and about my chances of getting the position.

They are looking to hire right away, but because I am still in school for this last semester, I can’t start full-time until May.  I would just be learning the ropes for the first several months, so I think that I can still do that part-time until I am done with school.  The advancement opportunities look great.  Networking and security are so hot right now.  I feel kind of bad stepping away from my focus in web design, but I think that I can bring that to the table as an asset to the company.

This job would be just perfect for me, because it gives me an opportunity to learn the trade.  I haven’t had the chance to do that in the last five years because of fencing.  Normally, kids in my major take a job on campus, administering the networks that cover the school.  I never got that opportunity.  This would be so perfect because I would learn something that will offer me a great career.

There is no doubt in my mind that I will eat this stuff up.  When I get focused on something, I live in it.  They will be lucky if they decide to hire me.  I look forward to the final interview next week.  I impressed the CEO today.  I have to impress the head of services next week.  It’s in the bag.

I just finished my first web design project for real money! Admittedly, I was comissioned to do it by my mother, who owns the company, but you have to start somewhere. I am glad I was given the opportunity.

It took the equivalent of about a week to finish. I did five days on-site in Mountain Top, PA with Clint Cummings, the head sales representative. I went every Monday for five weeks, and then did a little bit of tweaking back at my place in New Brunswick.

It’s great to finally have something to put on my resume. I will still have to rely on my accomplishments in fencing to get my foot in the door, but hopefully I will find an employer who sees those accomplishments as the result of years of hard work.

The cool part about it is that I now have some code to start a code library. This layout is fluid, which means it’s good for any size broswer window. You can have it infinitely wide, and pretty close to as small as you want it without losing any of the layout structure. It also comes with fully functional pop-out navigation, based on CSS. And of course, it is standards compliant!

It isn’t very creative aesthetically. This is what the company was aiming for. They didn’t want anything flashy; just strong and well structured. I enjoyed making it this way, because it is a design sense that I am comfortable working in. I aspire to something more creative in the future, however.

Bergen Machine dot com

Target Corp. is being sued by a blind college student at UC Berkeley. He filed the lawsuit because Target’s website lacks even basic accessibility provisions like alt-text, which screen reading software relies on to help blind individuals navigate the web.

A cursory glance at the site’s source code reveals that it is not even in compliance with WAI Priority 1 standards, the lowest level of basic requirements for accessibility compliance. I see a lot of people complaining that web standards restricts creativity (yeah, if you don’t take the time to learn CSS, just look at CSS Zen Garden). It is easier to comply with accessibility laws using web standards, but for those who can’t be creative with CSS and Javascript, it can also be done with proprietary methods like Flash. For large e-commerce website such as Target, however, Flash does not make sense because of the tremendous bandwidth it incurs.

This is good news and good publicity for web standards! It will scare other large websites into doing it the right way, or face class-action lawsuits over accessibility. This should create more jobs for people who understand and who, furthermore, promote web standards.