Estudo web dando resultado

Há algum tempo venho querendo botar em prática o que venho estudando de tecnologia web.

Na falta de algo mais desafiador para fazer, resolvi usar minha nameplate como teste. Esse site na verdade só estava apontando para um perfil meu, inicialmente para o do plaxo e depois para o do about.me. Agora resolvi colocar a responsabilidade em minhas próprias mãos e fazer eu mesmo o design e implementação. Não é exatamente a minha área ou meu forte mas é legal fazer algo diferente de vez em quando.

O resultado em versão desktop

Como editor de texto quis testar o novo Coda 2 da empresa Panic. Já usava o Prompt no iPhone e há tempos admirava o trabalho deles à distância. É uma ferramenta bem legal para esse tipo de desenvolvimento pois é possível fazer tudo de dentro de um único aplicativo: editar, commitar, visualizar e publicar.

Queria usar CCS3 mas sem precisar ficar me preocupando com o problema dos prefixos e usar algum dos pré-processadores para gerar o CSS. Eu já tinha usado o LESS mas com todo o buzz ao redor do SASS, resolvi experimentar usando a sintaxe SCSS. Procurando por ferramentas para automatizar a geração do CSS a partir do SCSS, encontrei o CodeKit. É uma ferramenta bem legal, ela faz o lint do HTML e do CSS, minimiza e ainda otimiza as imagens do site. Por conta dela, acabei me deparando com o Compass, que já tinha visto antes mas sem dar muita importância. Foi ele que resolveu meu problema com os prefixos, nada mais de -webkit, -moz, -ms, -o. Agora faço o @include dos estilos CCS3 apenas uma vez.

Versão móvel

Tentei usar um pouco do que aprendi lendo o Responsive Web Design e o Mobile First na hora de implementar o layout e acho que funcionou ... pelo menos no meu iPhone!

Nem testei com IE para não me aborrecer. Uma das vantagens de fazer algo apenas para si.

Só faltava achar um lugar para hospedar. Lembrei que tinha uma conta configurada no S3 e depois de descobrir que o Coda suporta essa plataforma, foi o que resolvi usar. Apanhei um pouco com as permissões, toda vez que fazia um upload os arquivos voltavam a ser privados.  Encontrei esse gist que seta os arquivos como públicos automaticamente a cada upload e o problema foi resolvido. Fiz o deploy no CloudFront, cadastrei no Webmaster Tools, rodei alguns testes de desempenho com o YSlow! e ponto final.

Agora só falta alguém visitar o site. Deem um pulo em http://marcelo.fontenele.com e me digam o que acham.

CBERS and me

I think it's time for me to talk a little about how I began working with remote sensing.

It was the end of 1998 and I was just about to leave on vacation, after the end of the semester, when I met a friend that had just seen an employment announcement in our university job board. At the time, I had just left my former job to focus on finishing my degree and was not looking for a job at all.

According to him, a company was searching for people interested in working for the brazilian space program. In my mind the only space program we had was the military attempts to build a satellite launcher (a.k.a. ballistic missile). It never crossed my mind that we were almost ready to operate a remote sensing satellite. I didn't give it much thought and went to Cabo Frio for a season on the beach.

One weekend he came over and we talked for a long time about his new job and all the things he was learning. He said the company was still looking for programmers and asked if I was interested. I cut my vacation short and came back to Rio for the job interview.

The company was in reality a small room in an apartment building in front of the beach near my own home in Barra da Tijuca, a neighborhood in the west side of Rio. They had been doing system specification for a while and now we had to built it in 6 months. I would be working in Red-Hat Linux 4.2, a short time later migrating to 5, and programming in C. The system would later be deployed to a DEC Workstation. My previous experience was with C++ and Delphi on Windows and some C on AIX, but not much. I also had a little experience with the now infamous SCO Unix.

We were under contract to a french company named Matra Systems et Information (that later became Aérospatiale and finally EADS), developing the image processing sub-system for the CBERS, China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, ground station.

I began working for DVR (later Gisplan and finally AMS Kepler) in Jan 1999, CBERS-1 was successfully launched from China on October 14 of the same year. I was so nervous I can't even remember how the first reception went.

By the time CBERS-2, mostly a copy of CBERS-1, was getting ready for launch there was a big change in INPE's direction, with a focus on releasing satellite imagery for free using the internet. They also wanted the new system to be able to process there historical archives for MSS, TM and later to process LANDSAT-7 ETM+ data. We won the bid for the system, this time as the prime contractor, and the Multi-Satellite Station System, MS3, was born, but this is a topic for another post.

Web Nameplate

After reading the post Have a say in what Google says about you at Lifehacker, I decided to take matters into my own hands. My new personal web nameplate is at Marcelo Fontenele S Santos. There you can find some detailed info about me and contact me if you wish. At this time I am using Plaxo's public profile as the gateway.