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Are you making your machine work for you? |
| by Neil Middleton 12:17 pm Thursday, 18 October 2007. |
Have a little think for a moment about the end of your work day…you might well get in your car, drive home and put your feet up.
Now think about the machine you were using all day. What’s that doing while you have your feet up? Is it also putting it’s silicon slippers on for the evening? If so, you’re missing a trick. You are not making your machine work for you. You have spent out the money for a virtual employee who does exactly what he’s told all day long, every day, but yet you are only making him work, say, 8 hours a day? What about the other 16 hours in the day (and the 48 hours at the weekend)? There is hours a week that you could be making use of all the technology that you have purchased.
So, what to do? Well, think about what you would do if you had another 128 hours a week. Think about what could get done. Now, take out anything from that list that is something requires thought - leave only the tasks that are repetitive. What’s left? Test cycles, source control administration tasks, creating new builds of applications?
Typically, these are the things people find are left over, all of which take a long amount of your time when carrying them out during your working day. So, don’t do them while you are at work - do them when you aren’t, or more specifically, make your computer do them. Computers are experts are menial repetitive tasks - and more specifically, they never complain, and never get it wrong.
So what can we do? Well typically this is described as continuous integration/continuous testing. This is the concept of employing a computer to do the boring stuff that a computer loves. Sit back and look at your code for a few minutes. Hopefully you have some unit tests lying around, as well as possibly some UI web tests via Selenium or similar. I would also guess there’s some source control work that needs to be done on a regular basis to aid testing etc, as well as some other miscellaneous tasks. All these are ripe for automation using Continuous integration and ANT.
Now I’m not going to delve into what continuous integration is, because many many people have done it before, and have done it better than I could, most notably Martin Fowler. The benefits are endless. While you are sat around watching TV in the evening, a machine at work can be sat doing FULL unit test cycles of your software, FULL UI test cycles etc etc. How cool is that?
During the day, by writing a few simple scripts in key places you can also have your machine work for you during the day too. Just done some scary low level changes to some software? Well kick off the same processes that run overnight, go make a cup of coffee and come back to your machine (hopefully) telling you that your software is still working perfectly. Additionally you can use scripting to simplify some common tasks. Regularly branching/merging/tagging your source control over the command line or via a tool like TortoiseSVN? Well, write some scripts, whack together a page containing a load of buttons to do the tasks, and then you can do the menial repetitive branches etc at the press of a button while you are sat there possibly eating a donut.
Whth all these mechanisms in place, which incidentally can be done for free, you can save your time during the day, and do more stuff at night that you previously wouldn’t have thoughy logistically possible. It will give you more time to do the stuff that web developers enjoy - thinking through problems, and cracking out new code.
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BBC chooses Flash for video |
| by Neil Middleton 3:09 pm Tuesday, 16 October 2007. |
I’ve just been sat here encoding some video to flash, and happened across a post by Peter Ent talking about how the BBC had chosen Flash for the basis of it’s iPlayer software (their online catch-up TV service).
So why is this significant? Well, think Silverlight. Microsoft have been pushing Silverlight as hard as they can for Video - so one would think that Silverlight would be ideal for the BBC’s iPlayer content - but No, the BBC have decided to go for flash - which is quite a significant win.
Now we just need them to get rid of all the RealPlayer based news content they pump out.
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Online backup with Mozy Backup |
| by Neil Middleton 8:34 pm Monday, 15 October 2007. |
I’ve always been a paranoid soul when it comes to backup. I’ve always sat there either burning DVD’s or labouriously configuring regular jobs to copy files to an external USB Hard disk which I then forget to leave on.
Therefore, I was quite chuffed when I got an IM from Kevin McCabe telling me about Mozy Backup. Mozy is a system whereby you bung them 5 dollars a month, and then you get unlimited upload to their backup servers via a little client app that you can install (and it works on Mac too). Once you’ve told it what you are wanting to backup, it does everything else for you. No schedules, no tapes, no DVDs - just a little client app.
Now, I’ve not tried restoring from it yet, and am still in the process of my initial upload of around 40Gb of data, but overall I like the stealth aspect of it all. I know that all my data is backed up both onsite and offsite for not a lot of money.
Just to note, I’ve just noticed that if you are backing up less than 2Gb, Mozy is also free…
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I’m a RIA N00b… |
| by Neil Middleton 3:09 pm . |
Yup, thats me.. Mr Server-side with a whole lack of Rich Internet goodness in my head.
If you’re anything like me you’re a CF (or server side) developer who’s kinda intrigued by the whole RIA movement that’s occuring. You’ve probably also dabbled in Flex, DHTML, Silverlight etc and not really got anywhere.
Well, I’ve been thinking about this problem and have decided to make a concerted effort to get better at producing RIAs whilst sharing the knowledge with everyone as I go along. What I plan to do, is work my way through some material (suggestions welcome) that will take me through a subject (Flex will be first - then probably AIR). From here, and at regular intervals I will write up in this blog what I have learnt in a way that I (and you, oh server-side developers) can relate to. I help you via the articles, and hopefully, you lot can help me via comments.
Hopefully by the end of it, I’ll end up knowing how to use the tools, as will you, and we’ll also up with a repository of tutorial style items aimed at server-side developers.
Before I start though, does anyone have anything in particular that they would like to see taken into consideration? Anything that they particularly want me to cover?
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It’s all about the text…mate. |
| by Neil Middleton 3:20 pm Friday, 12 October 2007. |
How many of you out there use a Mac? How many use a PC? How many of you are aware of a text editor called Textmate (Mac) or e (Windows)?
From Wikipedia: “TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X, created by Allan Odgaard. It provides users with innovative abstractions to support declarative customizations which are at once transparent and flexible.
Though its users are mostly programmers and its basic feature set may require more learning than simpler graphical editors, TextMate is much easier to customize than many other text editors. Notable features include tabs, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system, all built around its novel scope system.”
So, why is this relevant? Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been working on CFTextmate - a Coldfusion bundle for textmate.
The long term goal of the CFTextmate project is to create a bundle for textmate and e (therefore covering both windows and Mac) providing support for both CFMX and Bluedragon. Additional features over time may well include Framework support, CFQuickdocs support, as well as a stack of common tasks familiar to CFML programmers.
Currently there are no milestone releases, but the bleeding edge version in svn is nearly CF8 complete, as well as containing a load of cool tweaks. Once this stage is complete a full v1 release will be announced.
So, if you have a textmate or e license, download the bundle and try it out. There’s an issue tracker on riaforge, as well as the discussion group on google groups. As always, any feedback/ideas are gratefully received.
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