Once your latest project is finished, you are very likely to forget the structure of the project’s layout, with all its numerous classes, color schemes and type setting. To understand your code years after you’ve written it you need to make use of sensible code structuring. The latter can dramatically reduce complexity, improve code management and consequently simplify maintainability. However, how can you achieve sensible structuring? Well, there are a number of options. For instance, you can make use of comments — after all, there is always some area for useful hints, notes and, well, comments you can use afterwards, after the project has been deployed.

Indeed, developers came up with quite creative ways to use comments and text formatting to improve the maintainability of CSS-code. Such creative ways are usually combined into CSS styleguides — pieces of CSS-code which are supposed to provide developers with useful insights into the [...] Continue Reading…

I’d like to become a Development Team Leader

Hopefully most will have actually considered the change of role and be looking for new challenges and ways to contribute more to their chosen profession. However, for some this is an automatic response to a question that is particularly difficult to answer in an industry with no clear career path. For others it’s simply a way to move up the pay scale.

Before you start talking to your manager or applying for your next job it’s worth considering what you’re getting yourself into. Depending on where you work there will be different definitions of a Development Team Leader (DTL). To put this post in perspective this is my interpretation,

A Development Team Leader is someone who owns the technical delivery of a solution. They need to understand the business drivers behind the project and be able to lead a team of Developers to realise [...] Continue Reading…

1) Ajax is an idea, not an acronym

While Ajax commonly is spelled out as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the full name is not entirely appropriate because it oversimplifies the history of the technology and the implementation options that lie at its heart. More exactly, Ajax encompasses the idea that Web applications can be built to opt out of the typical post-wait-repeat cycle used in server-side-focused Web applications. Ajax lets Web applications move to a more responsive, continuous, but incremental style of updating. Ajax provides users a richer, more interactive way of experiencing the underlying Web application. This goodness for the user might mean that more monitoring and security oversight might be required of network professionals, as well as, potentially, server and network alterations.

2) It’s really all about JavaScript

Ajax applications are written in JavaScript and usually rely on the XMLHttpRequest object for communications, which is making its way through the [...] Continue Reading…

Shouldn’t we all be performing at the same level? Of course not, we’re not sewing buttons on an assembly line. We’re using every bit of our intelligence to create something that we can only begin to understand.

    * I think logically. Computers don’t care how you feel, and your opinion doesn’t matter. All that matters is if you write your code exactly the way the computer dictates.
    * I constantly look for better ways of doing things. I subscribe to a good number of development blogs. I alone cannot always come up with the best way to solve a problem, but somebody somewhere probably can.
    * I read books. Joel says that most programmers have stopped reading books. What a shame. Blogs are great for snippets, but it’s rare that they cover a topic well from start to finish. Blogs are the ADD version of books.
    * I don’t [...] Continue Reading…

There’s no shortage of stories about Google’s newly launched App Engine, but almost all of them get it wrong — because they compare the new service to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services (AMZN).

If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.

Why isn’t App Engine like EC2 & S3? Constraints, constraints, constraints:

* Google is going the run-time environment route, not the scalable, “put anything you want in a box and we’ll scale it” route that EC2 provides. Case in point: We could run the BricaBox Platform on EC2 by tailoring our own environment (the LAMP stack) and booting it up on Amazon’s servers. We could not get BricaBox running on AppEngine without [...] Continue Reading…