I don't like performing tedious, time-consuming tasks, especially when those tasks are non-revenue generating, which means they take time away from things I could be doing to increase revenue. The most time-consuming and tedious task I have to perform over-and-over is creating contacts sheet previews of my icons. The problem is that every marketplace has different requirements for preview image sizes and so a new contact sheet has to be created for each marketplace.

Working from home has become much more common over the past few years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. But whereas doing so was a choice before, now it is mandatory for many office workers. Working from home can be a challenge, though. Yes, it’s great to work in your pajamas and not have to shave regularly, but it comes with some pitfass as well. In this article I will share some tips I’ve picked up from having spent half of my 25 year career working from home.

Managing data almost always involves working with hierarchical or nested data. Whether we are talking about nested files and folders, product categories and sub-categories, music, ... you name it. But we store data in a database in a flat structure. This makes sense because the data objects themselves share the same attributes and it makes for easy searching. But how we store the data and how we need to visualize and manipulate it don't necessarily match. So how do we efficiently transform a flat array to a tree? Day 5 of 30 Days of Algorithms will present one solution with O(n) complexity.

For the past several months I have been working on a new Adobe Illustrator extension to make the functionality of IconJar available as a panel. In order to manipulate the IconJar data - which is stored in JSON, I needed to create "Plain Old JavaScript Objects" (POJsO?) with getters and setters. Rather than type out the same lines of code over-and-over, I decided to create a command-line utility to quickly create the JavaScript classes for me.

I apologize in advance for the length of this article and the sometimes meandering path it takes. I found this was not only a difficult article to write, and list of skills to compile, but also a difficult article to organize. I hope you find it useful.