Happy days, people! Happy days!
Jul 302007
Jul 262007
I just wanted to pass along this article about "What motivates programmers?", and let me state that it is right on. It's the hardware.
In fact, a few months ago I had a fellow programmer with less seniorship at work get a new laptop because her old one died. At the same time, I was still working on my very slow desktop. Even though I realized the switch was purely functional, I was still a bit resentful.
Funny, isn't it?
Jul 182007
Ok, so I've finally joined Facebook for the connecting benefits, thanks to some prompting from Jim Walton and Jason Powell.
Check out my profile, if you like.
Jul 172007
I just thought I'd point out a few projects that have been keeping me busy in the last few months which are now rolling full force on the web.
First, the Ballan Real Estate website which I worked on with my friend Wade. A pretty simple site here using just HTML and CSS. I would have liked to do a little ColdFusion work to allow the company to update their lot profiles and other details, but they only wanted simple, and that's what we gave them.
Second, the Red Sox Faithful site was finally launched during the MLB All-Star game last Tuesday. It's basically a ColdFusion version of the forums we had in PHP over at RedSox2000 the last few years. Basically, the old site had gotten bogged down in spam and difficult interface, so I tried my hand at rewriting the forums from scratch. I'm happy with how they came out, but I'm still tweaking a few things here and there.
I'm sure the Red Sox Faithful site will keep me busy in the coming months as I add features and work out bugs, but I'll also be planning on re-engineering my blogging platform in CF8 into something that is a little more full-featured (like with a real admin panel and can run multiple blogs at once). That will be my big intro to CF8 and all it's new features, and I'm looking forward to tackling the project.
Anyway, let me know what you think of my latest work when you get a chance!
Jul 102007
Sometimes, I really have a hard time believing the things that I read. Well, last week I came across a short article about a new book that computer science is not, and should not be based on mathematics.
Now, I can understand the opinion that programming requires less mathematical knowledge than it did in past decades because many algorithms have been established and languages have incorporated common complex computations into their folds. However, to claim that math is not needed for computer science is just rediculous. I'd love to see the author figure out the location of a mouse click without some kind of location calculation.
But maybe this does explain all the horribly inefficient code I've come across in my days as a developer.
Found via Slashdot
Jul 062007
Well, this week I finally got a chance to play with my CF8 beta server, and I'm liking the new user interface tags. It's not that they do anything revolutionary, but they do the things that we developers need to do regularly with ease and consistency.
For example, the cflayout tags will help make websites with cleaner layouts. I heard someone remark that the same thing could be done with 3 lines of CSS, but I've probably seen around a dozen different ways to create what looks like the same layout using CSS. Cflayout will allow teams of developers to more easily get on the same page and do things more consistently.
The cfpod tags seem a little goofy, but allow for small contained parts of pages that can be refreshed.
Probably my favorite part so far is the cfwindow tag, which allows for the creation of a floating window over the page. The reason I like them is because we use a lot of modal windows where I work, and we've got a series of large javascript files to manage them (which have gotten a little unwieldly over the years). With the cfwindow tag, we can eventually replace this design with just a few lines of ColdFusion code.
The only part I'm getting used to is the ColdFusion-ized javascript calls for refreshing parts of a layout, a pod or a window. It just seems less straight-forward than most ColdFusion code, but I guess we're a bit spoiled in that aspect. I'm sure once I'm used to it, it will become second-nature like most of the rest of the code is.
All in all, I'm seeing some very positive changes being made to ColdFusion so far, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further and start building full apps in it.