I shared a small rant at a local web meetup the other day, and thought I’d recap it here. It was triggered by sitting in on an interview with a local developer for an idea-stage startup I’m counseling.
The startup in question has had some false starts on an MVP before, once in ASP.NET, and once in PHP (or maybe twice). What’s come out of this was an understanding that the particular tech chosen is less important than finding sharp people who can see the project through to the first phase being functional. I helped write a Craigslist ad to that effect, it was posted, and we’ve sifted through some of the applicants and did a couple interviews.
What’s been interesting to me is that many of the people applying are .net developers. I’ve nothing against .net, but typically, you don’t find too many looking to jump in to the entrepreneurial space; it’s very much a corporate-enterprisey sort of thing. I know .net-startups exist, but they’re a small fraction compared to the number of web startups based on dynamic languages (php, python, ruby, etc).
So we met with someone, and he asked what the site was written in. My friend explained there’s no current site, but an early draft had been done in PHP. The .net-dev grimaced. “PHP is just not capable, it just won’t work for some things, it’s not efficient, there’s things it can’t do, C# is much better technology,” and so on. This was not a 5 minute diatribe, I’ll grant you, but it was long enough, and … ill-informed enough to make me question his judgement skills on other things.
I can expect this sort of tribalism from someone just starting out in development. I don’t expect it from someone with 15 years of experience. I would expect that you’d mature to the point where you understood that almost all tech out there is suitable for a wide-range of applications, and that the language itself is rarely a bottleneck (compared with database servers, network latency, etc.) And yes… I expect this because I’ve seen these attitudes diplayed out over many colleagues, but also definitely in myself.
I’m ashamed of some of the partisan writings I posted back 10 years ago; I was wasting huge amounts of time arguing pointless stuff that had no real impact. Perhaps that’s half the purpose of internet forums in general, but it took me a while to realize the emptiness in those pissing matches, and regret much of what I contributed all those years ago. But it does help give me a sense of perspective, as does my shifting tech skills: I’ve gone from MS/VB/Access to Notes to Perl to PHP to ASP to PHP to Java with a bit of C# thrown in over the years. After you’ve done this long enough, you realize that there’s enough change in tech that few of the skills from 10 years ago really matter, which is another way of saying that little of what you’re learning now will have much utility in 10 years.
I’ve got another rant on reusing software coming up soon; stay tuned (or come back, or subscribe to the RSS) to have a read.
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Code testing
The TriJUG last night had a speaker cancellation, and someone from the group presented an ad-hoc talk on testing – outlining various types, pros/cons, some metrics and code samples he uses, etc. Overall it was useful for a topic, and I hope he polishes it up and presents it next year as a fuller talk more fleshed out.
I’d interrupted a couple times with my own questions and experiences, but there was one I wanted to share which I didn’t last night. He was talking about the justification for testing (unit and integration primarily), and couched it in terms that developers would be familiar with. ”Without tests in place, you can’t be confident that your changes won’t break anything!”. It’s true, and for some audiences (last night’s) it makes sense.
Let me preface this by saying that I do not do enough testing myself in my projects – this is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ post, somewhat, but hear me out. :)
There’s a more fundamental reason to ‘do testing’, as it’s often referred to by non-techies (and even some techies I know). In fact, you can’t *not* test, which is the fundamental point I was going to make last night. Testing *happens*. *When*, *where* and *how* you test is totally up to you. You can have testing procedures before changes are pushed out, have a test suit to give a sense of confidence to the team, and so on. Or… you can just push code to production servers. It’ll get tested with real world data by real users, with often real (bad) consequences.
Again – *testing always happens*. Testing on your own terms, with defined procedures, steps, processes, etc. is better than testing ‘fixes’ at 2am on a Thursday morning.
“But there’s no time to test!” is what I often get as push-back from people I present to (and, yes, I use it myself sometimes on myself!). Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, ‘testing’ (writing tests, defining them, checking them, etc) will take 100 hours on top of ‘development’ (as if they’re somehow distinct entities!) If you skip those 100 hours, you’ve only shifted them around. You’ll spend *at least* 100 hours cleaning up stuff after the code has gone live, and in the process you may damage the reputation of your department, company or yourself in the process. No amount of time (100 hours? 1000 hours?) can replace the damage that’s done by lost orders, lost money, privacy exploits, security breaches or worse.
So to reiterate – the testing *will* happen. Under what circumstances do you feel most comfortable testing? In non-public controlled situations? Or out in public where your customers and competitors can see and exprerience your mistakes?
Check out the conference for web freelancers while you’re here…
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Open Source LinguaFolio software project available
A couple of years ago I was asked to build a piece of software implementing the concepts of the LinguaFolio “formative assessment tool”. That’s education-speak for something that helps students and teachers understand how a student is doing. 
I was asked to build this by the state of North Carolina, and for the past two years they’ve been rolling this out to more students and teachers around the state.
The LinguaFolio tool is free for all students and teachers in NC, and is essentially free for others to use because it’s an open source software project. The main code is available to download and run anywhere. It’s a Java/Grails/MySQL web app which, while not as simple to set up and host as a PHP app, is still pretty basic. We’ve still got a lot of functionality to implement, and I’m slowly adding some new features over the next few months, but I thought I’d mention this here so people would know it’s available. As far as I know there’s only one other ‘online’ version of LinguaFolio, but it’s not open source or free or even available to test out. As more people become interested in using LinguaFolio, there may be more options, but right now, our elinguafolio project is picking up steam.
Now you may be thinking “hey, that’s great it’s open source, but I don’t know how to run any software like that!”. And you may be right. Just because something is open source doesn’t necessarily make it 100% useful to anyone out of the box – it’s more a case of giving you freedom to find the right vendor to work with (or change vendors if you’re not happy). If you’re interested in using LinguaFolio in your district or state, tell your vendor to grab the software and run it. They can reach out to me with questions (there’s an issue tracker on that site above) and, within reason, I can assist them in setting it up.
Or… you can simply hire me to do it for you. I can set it up and host it on servers I manage (and can give you access to as well) for a standard monthly price. You’ll have a version that is kept up to date, and you’ll be helping to fund the open source LinguaFolio which will continue to help more teachers and students over the coming years. If you’re interested, give me a call at 919 827 4724 to discuss how I can help.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
indieconf 2012 open for registration
indieconf 2012 is open for registration. The early bird pricing of $79 is available through August 15. We’re still putting together our schedule – it will be finalized by the end of August.
indieconf is the conference for web freelancers, solopreneurs, and others who make their living working for themselves on the web. Developers, designers and everyone in between are all welcome. Sessions cover more of the business side of freelancing – legal, financial, business, marketing, etc – vs technical (although we’re planning some technical sessions as well).
At the site above, we’ve got 4 videos from last year’s event (possibly more coming shortly) – here’s two examples from that site embedded here to give you an idea of the types of sessions we’ll have this year.
Referrals: Interested in earning affiliate referrals fees for the conference? Register with eventbrite and earn a referral fee for each ticket you sell!
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
virus scanning as a service – looking for feedback
I’m looking for feedback on a project idea. This grew out of a project I did last year that involved a lot of user file uploads that are then downloadable by others. Virus scanning needed to be part of the process, but I couldn’t find a good service out that that offered this. I did find one, but they explicitly forbid commercial use of the service, which somewhat took it of the table.
So.. feedback please. Have you ever needed a service like this? Did you just roll your own, or perhaps just went without?
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
indieconf 2011 call for presenters
Our indieconf 2011 call for presenters is open.
indieconf is the conference for independent web professionals – whether you’re a developer, designer or someone in between, if you’re an independent freelancer or small agency, indieconf is for you.
What are we looking for? Topics of direct or indirect interest to web freelancers – mobile development, server side tech, client side tech, workflow issues, client management topics, financial issues, legal issues, marketing, SEO and more!
indieconf will be held in Raleigh, NC on November 19, and we’ve got an early bird special of $99/ticket going on right now – get your ticket today!
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Silverlight on Android?
I just read a quick blurb about Android’s inventor suggesting they’d welcome Silverlight on the Android. A quick search around showed there was some activity on this topic in March, but it seems to have died off. Is this actually coming? It’d be interesting to see if MS could pull it off and make it run in the JVM. That would have larger implications for non-Android devices (better support under Linux, perhaps?) certainly, but also be a strategic threat against Flash.
Right now “flash on the iphone” is still (for some reason) some big meme in the webosphere. Well, I get the reasons, and I think it’s more to do with Jobs’ aggressive stance than it is people actually missing the tech in most casses. Were Silverlight to be available on Android devices, there would be a much stronger case for people to consider developing in Silverlight in the first place. As cool as SL is from a pure geek standpoint, there’s still little reason for most people to learn it unless you’re targetting a pure MS-deployment environment. Yes, there’s a Mac plugin, but it’s just something we rarely see outside of MS shops writing for their own, or basically not caring about web-standards and cross-platform accessibility all that much (any modern SL app will automatically preclude Linux and non-Intel Macs).
So, will MS join forces with Google (metaphorically speaking) to do battle for mobile-dev mindshare against Apple? Having a cross-device RIA stack won’t do the trick on its own, but certainly does add a bit more complexity to the mix.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
The independent web developer blog
I’m launching a new blog over at http://www.webdevindie.com to focus more of my ‘web development’ topics over there. I’ll likely still post some here, but if you want more of my web-related stuff, I suggest that you subscribe to webdevindie.com. Yes, it’s the same theme as this blog for now, so it might be slightly confusing at first, but it is different. :)
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
UserFly Usability Checking via Screen Recording
I recently found UserFly.com, a service which will record videos of the visitors to your site, allowing you to play them back and watch where users go (and how they move their mouse around on the screen).
I was flabbergasted at how easy this was to use – I tried the free version and had recordings going in 2 minutes. It was that easy. It has to be seen to be believed.
As a techie, I’d tried to build something similar 4 years ago. Owing to my own limitations, as well as the much more fractured browser landscape 4 years ago, I never got this working to the level that I liked. Having attempted just a small portion of what userfly is doing, I can truly appreciate the engineering that went in to this service.
If you’re interested in testing it out, please follow my referral link (yes, it’s an affiliate link). They offer a free version to get going, and paid versions start at $25/month $10/month. The $50/month plan would be what I’d recommend if you have any ecommerce or security, as it will handle SSL pages. But the free or $25/month packages might be fine for basic sites.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Who I use for domain name registrations
I get asked this on a fairly regular basis, often by people new to the domain and hosting scene. I’ve got a lot of domains at GoDaddy that I’ve purchased over the years, but for most new domain purchases I’ve found omnis.com, and I’ve been very happy with them so far (just over a year). (yes, that’s an affiliate link, so I’ll make a bit o’ cash if you click that and purchase something from them).
I don’t recommend their hosting plan, nor godaddy’s, nor anyone else’s for that matter. I’ve managed my own dedicated servers for 10 years, and would have a hard time recommending any shared hosting plan for anyone, mostly because of the restrictions of freedoms I’ve found. Many people may not need it, but I do, so I can’t specifically tell you to use omnis.com for domain *hosting*. However, purchasing domains through them and pointing the name servers anywhere else (which they let you do easily) is fine (and what I do). To be fair, I’ve not tried their hosting plan, so I can’t comment on it, which is why I don’t recommend it.
Why do I like omnis? Price. GoDaddy has lower initial pricing, assuming you can find a coupon code (and they’re all over the place if you look for them). This can often get a .com domain name down to $7 from GoDaddy for the initial registration period. Yes, if you buy 5 years up front, you’ll get the $7 price for 5 years. However, most people don’t do that (I don’t – I try too many domain names every year). So, purchasing for one year at GoDaddy is $7 (with coupon) and $8.95 from omnis.com. Almost a $2 difference! However, come renewal time, GoDaddy has steadily gone *up* for me year after year, and omnis.com hasn’t (so far). Renewing that $7 .com for me at GoDaddy jumps to $10.69 plus some ICANN fee. So, for 2 years, I’m at almost $18 with GoDaddy, and pretty much the same at omnis.com. Following year, I’ll be saving money.
Is is worth it to try to save money on a 2-3 year time horizon? Strictly by the numbers, no. However, I’ve felt GoDaddy has become a bait/switch operation with respect to the higher domain name renewal fees. Coupons or special deals might help in some cases, but I’d prefer to give my domain business to someone who doesn’t bait/switch or need to rely on massive promotions. Yes, omnis are smaller, and yes, I might have problems with them at some point, but I haven’t in over a year, I don’t get upsold a huge amount of junk trying to check out, and the support I’ve had for the few questions I’ve sent in has been reasonable (typically answered by a human via email within a few hours max).
So, if you’re looking to help support a smaller domain registrar with decent service and decent prices, give omnis.com a spin.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
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