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Unemployment, ESWC and a Javascript Date Picker

Posted 26 Jul 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola

This is a much deserved update.

I finally resigned about 2 weeks ago. After 2 years and 6 months. It was a pretty cool experience considering all the additional I had to do as a software developer - Linux/Windows server administration, technical support, database administration - in addition to actual software development. I'm actually preparing to go to university to take Computer Science so I decided to quit. Currently doing freelance work here and there, though, and it's very rewarding.

Yeah, I attended the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) event held here in Nigeria and it was pretty fun. I participated in Warcarft 3 and Trackmania Nations Forever (very fun game, btw) I only picked up Warcraft 3 a month prior to the event, so I was pretty much a newbie compared to the other participants. I got pretty good at the game, but what killed me at the competition was the fact that I wasn't very conversant with Night Elves (race selection was Random) so I finished up at 5th place. I could use Humans, Orcs and Undead. But not Night Elves. Lameness. On the other hand, I did take second place in Trackmania. The second place prize wasn't very encouraging though, but all in all, it was fun.

I also got around to coding a Javascript date picker control from scratch. Sadly, the available solutions are either rather crappy, or require you to pay before you can use them, or both. Which led to me writing my own! Good thing is I had done something similar in the past (wrote a calendar system in PHP about 3 years ago) so I had something to base off on, and I was done within a few hours. And I suppose it's rather good, and easy to integrate into existing code. I have a demo online. It's free for everyone to use and modify, etc. You can download the whole thing here. As for improvements, I'm thinking of implementing month selection - something similar to how it's done in Vista. Let's not forget the obligatory screenshot.