Jess Boctor

Category: Create Space

  • When Snarky Doesn’t Play

    So I just had an interesting experience at work.

    My team is getting ready for a meetup. In preparation for our gathering, each team member is ordering custom Yeti Ramblers.

    We decided to put our team name on one side and whatever custom text each team member wants on the other side. The second print is to make it easy to identify who the bottle belongs to in a sea of swag bottles.

    My team, known as Hobbes, has a friendly rivalry with another team in our division, Sparta. In reality, we all get along really well and enjoy helping one another out.

    That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of teasing and one-upmanship displayed in the form of GIFs and memes.

    So of course, I thought to further this through my swag bottle. My concept for the design was to use the logical operator ! in my custom print. The bottle should have looked like this:

    Essentially, I wanted the bottle to read Hobbes NOT Sparta

    When placing the order, I noticed some weird behavior on the website and thought it strange that there was no mention of my custom design in the order summary. But full of faith in Yeti’s web development team, I placed the order anyways.

    A couple of days later, after noticing my bottle shipped much faster than my teammates, I asked them what their order confirmations looked like.

    It seems that I am being shipped a blank bottle.

    Curious as to what happened and how I managed to order the bottle without the design, I went back to the customizer.

    Turns out my snark broke their customizer

    Feeling a little exasperated that I couldn’t get my custom design to get added to the cart in either Chrome or Firefox, I began to troubleshoot. That’s when it hit.

    I thought I had to be mistaken at first. In my mind, there was no way that including the logical operator ! in the design it would break things.

    But it did.

    As soon as I removed the offending character, the customizer works as expected. A teammate tested and let me know that by adding another character in front of the !, the customizer works as well.

    I made a video of running through both design creations:

    Go to https://d.pr/v/YfuBaM to watch the video

    Consider the lesson learned. Snark doesn’t always play.

    Also, anyone have a contact for the dev team at Yeti?

    Adventure on.

  • Life On A Table

    A table scape showing headphones, a journal, bible, art supplies, maps, a laptop, tea, and game cards.

  • Five Minutes Is All I Have

    This little man is five months old today.

    Time is so fickle. It is a horrendous flirt that makes you feel like five months has been so much and also so little. Always thinking you have it and you need it.

    In the midst of the foreplay, it is so simple to miss the little things, the quiet important moments, the good habits, the things that you never regret.

    Time teases and caresses and says, “There is always so much more of me.”

    Until there isn’t.

    I have to admit, the last five years I have been falling for the sandkeepers siren song. Thinking I would always have more time.

    Among many other things, I have been claiming that someday I would have more time to write.

    And somewhere in waiting for more time, I lost my voice to lost time. I blinked and entered a new decade and a new phase of life.

    This last year has taught me a lot about being patient, about treasuring time, and about getting things done today.

    It’s also taught me a lot about taking the small steps. About solving for now. About being content in what I am able to accomplish today rather than procrastinating in hopes of a grand finale.

    So how does one find more time in the throes of a five month old child, a sixteen year marriage, a vibrant community lifestyle, a full time job, and a lifelong journey of faith?

    5 minutes at a time.

    Because that is all I have.

    Adventure on.