Welcome to the group!

[Michael Kimsal]

Hey - there's been a couple of you joined up yesterday - thanks for stopping by!  What's your background in web development?  Tools, tech, focus, etc?

[David Negron]

I've been developing for the web since 2000 or so. I've worked on many web development platforms over the years from Classic ASP, ColdFusion, PHP and ASP.NET. Presently I work for a marketing agency that services associations and other professional organizations. I'm very much a jack of all trades as a result of working on small teams over the years where I've mostly been the sole developer. My design skills are still abysmal but fortunately we've had other talented folks to bail me out. My passion has always been on developing the code in the back end that makes all the pretty stuff work.

Toolbox:

• Visual Studio /w ReSharper
  
• Fireworks CS5
  
• Sublime Text 2 (PHP/Javascript)
  
• Notepad++ (Mostly as my scratch pad)
  
• Beyond Compare (Deployment)
  
• Fiddler (Debugging HTTP)
  
• Putty
  
• Git/Mercurial (Source Control)
  
• Balsamiq (Modeling UI's)
  
• Xmind (I mostly use mind maps for organizing/planning architecture of applications)
  
• Windows Virtual PC (Mainly so that I can setup virtual environments for testing against IE6/7/8/ETC and FF3/4/ETC)
  
• Litmus.com (Mostly for generating proofs for clients)
  
• ExactTarget.com (Email Campaigns)
  

[Michael Kimsal]

Interesting set of tools.  What's changed over the years?

WRT design, I've already beat the drum on twitter bootstrap a lot recently, wondering if you have any stock/default styling/design/layout stuff in your bag of tricks.

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Michael Kimsal
http://michaelkimsal.com
919.827.4724

[David Negron]

Over the years I've become more pragmatic considering that most of the websites I put together don't tend to live long lives. So my current recipe is fairly simple in that I use http://html5boilerplate.com/ (remembering to replace the humorous hot pink highlight color that Paul Irish put in) as my base and then I add an override.css to store all of my custom styles. http://www.discoveraade.org is a fairly good example of my style keep in mind its not my design I merely only convert the composite created by the art department into html. 

What's changed over the years? 

Well in my early days all layout was done with tables (tables were the proverbial hammer). It took me a while to transition to using CSS mainly because like Javascript at the time CSS was just one of those things that I failed to appreciate. I credit folks like John Resig and Eric Meyer for opening my eyes to the power of Javascript and CSS.

As for software development on the web at least on the Microsoft side of the world it has been like ridding a boomerang. The early days of Classic ASP you pretty much built anything and everything from scratch. Once ASP.NET was introduced they tried to focus on developer productivity and I'd also say they wanted to encourage Desktop developers to move over to the web. This lead to lots of code bloat because of the amount of infrastructure required to make the web development emulate that of desktop application development. Personally this lead me to develop my own web development framework that got rid of much of the bloat. Funny enough around 2007 ASP.NET MVC came about and to my delight it did many of the things that I had been doing (so i abandoned my framework and adopted theirs). The current incarnation of ASP.NET MVC is pure awesome in my opinion because it just gets out of your way and lets you get stuff done.

I've learned many lessons over the years but the one I would rank number one is only build what you need to get the job done (BTW I love The Twitter Bootstrap). This doesn't mean you cut corners and work in a sloppy manner but rather don't over engineer the solution to the problem. As a guy that loves to code it's easy to decorate and over complicate things because you might need it someday.

David Negron
Blog: http://www.craftingcode.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/negrond
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/negrond

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.

[Michael Kimsal]

All excellent points.  It was a little hard for me to give up some of the 'homegrown' framework stuff I'd built (and tried to commercialize) over the years (in the PHP world), and I've not totally embraced any one PHP framework/library out there as a replacement, but using *some* tool that has a much wider audience and is considered a standard has a lot of social and business advantages that I didn't see years ago.  

1.  easier to work with other people - sort of.

2.  easier to transition work away to someone else - yes.

3.  easier to respond to job/contract work that require "MVC" (telling them I wrote my own 3 years before any of the current crop of frameworks was even started doesn't compute with most of them)

So... I get your movement towards ASP.NET MVC.  I've seen some interesting stuff crop up there - the view engine 'competition/evolution' (spark, razr, etc) for one.  It's amazing how similar most of the ideas between frameworks really are, even if most of the users have no clue.

There's a balance between 'cutting corners' and 'optimizing my effort' which... I have to say, I'm still developing after all these years. I've gone back on projects recently from 2-3 years ago and been embarrassed at.  I make fixes in a few minutes, when I know at the time I knew there was a 'better' way, but also knew it would take me hours or days to research/test/integrate correctly, vs the hack I used.  Certainly I have that knowledge 2 years later, and it's just a few minutes (and in some cases, the tools are better now), but I tend to feel like I cheated the client somehow, and they're having to pay me to fix my own 'mistakes'.  Objectively I don't think that's the case, but there's a bit of protestant guilt I was brought up with - everything's my fault all the time - so... I struggle with that some.

[David Negron]

I wouldn't feel too guilty. In my opinion if you don't feel disgusted when you look back at your old work and  then you are doing something wrong hehe. I like to think that the me of tomorrow is always moving forward and doing a better job than the me of today or yesterday.

[David Negron]

Well maybe disgusted is too strong a word in retrospect but at least some manner of dissatisfaction.

In the last few years I've been reading and following "Uncle" Bob Martin and I've learned quite a few of what might seem as common sense tips when it comes to code quality. My favorite of his ideas is that of applying the boy scout rule "You should always leave the campground cleaner than you found it." to my code. As a solo developer on a small team I don't have the advantage of other developers to review my work. Though if I wait six months and look at my code sometimes I wonder who wrote it.

[Željko Filipin]

On Thursday, June 28, 2012 3:04:29 AM UTC+2, Michael Kimsal wrote:

Hey - there's been a couple of you joined up yesterday - thanks for stopping by!  What's your background in web development?  Tools, tech, focus, etc?

I am software tester since 2004, focused on web and automation (Ruby and Watir). I have started freelancing in my free time a few months ago, but there is so much demand for test automation at the moment, that I have decided to freelance for a living. Time will tell if that was a good decision.

Željko Filipin

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filipin.eu

[Michael Kimsal]

You're the second person I know of that's gone this route (well, one was a company that organized test automation people).  Wow!  What do your jobs look like?

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[Željko Filipin]

On Thursday, July 5, 2012 12:46:19 PM UTC+2, Michael Kimsal wrote:

What do your jobs look like?

I have just published a screencast about that:

http://filipin.eu/test-automation-at-homeswap-com/

Željko 

[David Negron]

You did a great job for that having been your first video. I'm not sure I could have done as good a job my first time out.

I've been considering adding Jenkins CI into my workflow now that I have to deploy to multiple servers. Do you have any opinion between Jenkins and Hudson? A majority of my projects would be .NET. I have looked into Jetbrains TeamCity but unfortunately I have more than 20 active projects and I work on a small team with little to no budget.

[Željko Filipin]

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 1:11 PM, David Negron <neg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You did a great job for that having been your first video.

Thanks. It was not actually my first recorded video, I did a few of draft recordings, but this is the first published screencast that I have created.

> Do you have any opinion between Jenkins and Hudson?

Well, Jenkins is just a (recent) fork of Hudson, so there is not a lot of difference. I have picked Jenkins since it looked to me that the majority of the Hudson community moved there.

Željko

[David Negron]

I'll have to play with Jenkins a bit to see what the experience is like working with .NET projects.

I've read quite a bit about test driven design and I've tried to embrace it on a few of my projects but I keep getting stuck on that whole mentality that it is slowing me down. Would you qualify your work in testing as acceptance testing or do you get the opportunity to write unit and integration tests also?

[Željko Filipin]

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 1:42 PM, David Negron <neg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you qualify your work in testing as acceptance testing or do you get the opportunity to write unit and integration tests also?

I mostly write acceptance tests. I do write unit tests sometimes for my tests. :)

I was also recently working as a developer on a project, and I was writing unit tests.

Željko