Recently in development Category

I was told not too long ago by someone that the year 2007 brought about a rather large change to the working masses. That change was that the number of service-based jobs out numbered that of production jobs. Now whether this is due to robots from the Robotic Uprising of the Late 90's, or that the majority of the population is too busy or too rich to worry about learning how to do things themselves isn't quite known. But no matter how you answer that question, an even larger one comes up, "Is the customer always right?" I'm sure everyone's heard that expression before — probably from working in retail or for some older gentleman when they were young — "The customer is always right, even when he's not." But in today's society of extreme specialization, can we still opperate productively by that same principle? Can we trust that the consumer (or client) isn't out to just get a superior service for an inferior price? And once we do believe the consumer/client isn't out to just get a deal, do we push for their education through our experience and expertise or simply give them that for which they are asking?

It's been a long haul, but my latest and greatest project is ready to go live. I've joined up with a great friend from college (follow her twitter feed @lynndro) to start a full-service interactive business that focuses on young company branding.

We both decided that the typical 8am-5pm lifestyle was not in our best interest and we could make a better impact on the world by being our own bosses. Sure, that's easier said than done, but we've taken that first step and have become a recognized business in Houghton County, Michigan

I'm pretty new still when it comes to cakePHP, but there's a few things that I've noticed in my limited exposure that screams a developer created this. Throughout my job I learned that my foremost expectations of "web developers" is completely not true. I was under the impression that everyone in web development (whether they focused on design or development) could build a fully dynamic website. Sure, people focusing in development may make some odd design and layout issues, but he/she would still get the job done.

Over on Jesus is my Sword this weekend was a post wondering if websites should be thought of as software and free updates should be expected. It felt to me like he was saying that they should be expected. I don't think that same way. I'm much more under the opinion that a website servers a specific purpose now and that anything other than potential security issues should not be "given" as a free upgrade.

Recently the company I work for made a decision to make a decision to choose a content management system (CMS) to use for most of our clients. In all, it sounds like a great idea for us programmers as the workload from designer to programmer would hopefully move from 30%-70% to closer to 50%-50%. But by being able to lessen our work load, do we essentially loose our marketability for the future?

With starting a new job, I've had the opportunity to engulf myself in a new and "interesting" language: Adobe/MacromediaColdFusion. Because I'm starting out as a total beginner with CF and moving from PHP, I thought I'd sign up for some mailing lists from House of Fusion and also to be a beta tester for Adobe. I got a copy of CF 8 (codenamed scorpio) for linux and decided to take my old-school Mac and turn it into a ubuntu server with mysql 5, php 5, apache 2, and CF 8.

So I ran off to Ubuntu and grabbed a copy of their server edition of Edgy 6.10 and installed a LAMP server i just under 2 hours (slow computer and all, takes for a while.)

With the launch of theCircumlocution.com, I've decided that I no longer want to use Movable Type as the backend for displaying my online portfolio. To make things short, it just didn't have the capabilites that I wanted such as being able to highlight a current project or a best project or even finished projects. I do suppose it would be possible to add fields to the database to do this, but then I'd have to do custom programming to show the results. I'm sure there'd be a way to write a plugin for MT as well, but I don't really think I'll be suggesting MT as a blogging/CMS solution to anyone anymore because wordpress is free and fast (PHP), not expensive and slow (perl). So why learn how to program plugins for a, in my mind, slowly dying blogging system software?