JArment Blog

Sacrificing your vocal identity for the sake of the whole

We all have unique singing voices. Our tone, style and sounds all shape that identity - no two voices are the same. It’s why we can hear a song for the first time and know exactly who it is.

While it’s always fun to sing the lead line of our favorite song, It’s important to understand and know the sound of the team your singing with. This can vary from song to song, but identifying the lead and supporting parts is vital to the success of the team.

No one part is more or less important than another, So knowing and filling your role is crucial on a worship team. When you’re not the lead vocal on a song, you’re a supporting vocal. Supporting vocals exist to bring body, fullness, and thus energy to the sound. They shouldn’t stand out or be easily recognizable.

Their unique identity should be sacrificed to enhance the sound of the team.

An extreme example is an opera singer. When she’s center-stage belting out notes with heavy verbrado and general operatic style, you hear her unique voice. But the next night she’s one voice in a choir of 30. You can’t pick out her voice (and you don’t want to); instead you experience the sound of many voices becoming one sound.

A more relevant example comes from Chris Quilala of Jesus Culture. A fantastic worship leader and singer. You can spot his voice from a mile away in songs like Your Love Never Fails and One Thing Remains. But when he’s singing a harmony behind Kim Walker on Show Me Your Glory. He displays a completely different type of sound. It supports Kim, and even  pushes her. When he sings, it lifts the song to another level, and the result is a powerful and beautiful chorus/bridge.

Check out the whole song and listen for his part around 3:06 (5:54 & 7:45), but more importantly identify your role in every song you sing. And make sure your voice is added to the sound of the whole.

YUI Conf 2012: Scaling YUI in the Enterprise

In his talk at YUI Conf 2012, Kevin Lamping talks about how USAA built a component based web framework and scaled it up to what it is today.

• Many of USAA’s users are on deployment and don’t always have powerful computing devices.
• Performance issues were showing up on their pages.
• They use a service called “Wicket” to build components in Java and produce the needed JavaScript.
• Issue was caused by many YUI().use statements on a single page.
• Grouping all modules into a single YUI().use statement wasn’t an option.
• By sharing one YUI() instance, performance was vastly improved.
• Still multiple calls and config objects were not helping performance.
• Stored configuration on the html input (via data attributes) removed the need for a restting the config object before each instantiation.

Lessons Learned

• Don’t repeat yourself. Even in generated code.
• Always view your generated source to ensure it’s what you want it to be.
• Performance test with real-world scenarios.
• Scale your performance test. (Don’t just test a single instance.)

Fair Fighting Rules

The do not, cannot stop lines when fighting with your spouse (from a Sunday sermon):

• No bringing up past sins, situations or topics - It’s not fair
• No personal attack. - Be mad about the thing, not about the person.
• No threats - Bodily, verbally anything.
• No manipulation - “If you loved me…”
• No contempt - You’re not just calling them an idiot, you think they’re an idiot… Eye-rolling.
• Do not abandon the (fighting) ring - You’ve got to be willing to stand in there and fight (i.e. Do not stonewall or being quiet).
• Be willing to take breaks - When things get to hot, take a break and cool off.

YUI Conf 2012: Use a JavaScript Framework to Lower Project Development Costs

In his talk at YUI Conf 2012, Jeff Pihach covers JS framework for your web application.

• Frameworks provide organization, code conventions and standards across an entire team.
• This structure lowers the on-boarding process and improves productivity.
• Consistent APIs speed up development. Know how the framework does it, and emulate (extend) it.
• Developers don’t like writing documentation. Creating docs on the fly is easy with tools like YUIDoc.
• Documentation helps the entire team.
• Testing. Tools like YUI Test and Yeti lower the bar for testing your code.

YUI Conf 2012: Building native Win8 apps with YUI

In his talk at YUI Conf 2012, Tilo Mitra shares his experience developing a Windows 8 app used to run YUI unit tests. And gives a deep-dive into the details of creating an app.

• Windows 8 apps presents lots of opportunity.
• 2,000 apps in their app store at launch 2 weeks later there are already 13,000 apps.
• Challenge: There are multiple different JS runtimes. (Some of the runtimes don’t allow third party plugins).
• It uses IE10 to process HTML/CSS/JS
• Assets bundled locally
• Apps are all single-page apps.
• The apps are given a baseline MVC-like structure.

I don’t always know what to say

I don’t always know what to say. Similarly, I feel like my current focus in life wavers between a series of things in my life. I know what my priorities are, but my actions don’t always match those priorities.

Are they really priorities in my life?

I have to believe they are. Maybe it’s that belief that makes it true. Maybe that belief make me a “dreamer”.

Help me set & live by the priorities You have for me.

No more excuses!

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for years now. I’ve made promises to myself, new years resolutions, and told my wife “I’m gonna start blogging”. The blogging has yet to happen, now it’s time to actually follow through.

In the past, I’ve planned on building the blog platform myself, but that has only proven to be a hinderance to my consistency. So I’m gonna roll with Tumblr for now.

The blog will cover all sorts of topics from faith and family, to design and development.