Phillip Haydon

On the 1st of April, Glenn Block posted a link that was too good to be true.

www.codeschool.com

I have a habit of checking out most links that don’t look like they link to a porn site or some look at photo of me and signup to see me naked. This particular link interested me because his tweet mentioned Backbone, something I’ve been wanting to learn for a while and that I’m been hoping Derick Bailey would add to his awesome JavaScript video collection: http://www.watchmecode.net (his JavaScript series is absolutely brilliant and I’ve learnt SO much from him so go support him so he will make more plz kthxbi)

Anyway CodeSchool allows you to do level 1 of most courses for free, and if you like what you try you can purchase the rest of the course. Buying the courses 1 by 1 is a little bit expensive at $55 USD, but it’s well worth the money.

You’re not getting just a video like you would with sites like Plural Sight, Tekpub, or any of the many other site’s popping up lately.

After each lesson in the course, there’s a series of challenge”s which allow you to utilize your new gained knowledge and put it to the test. The Backbone course challenges you to make a small ToDo list application, starting out really basic and slowly modifying the code to follow best practice, or add new features.

Each challenge builds on top of the previous, it gives you a story with some helpful information on functions to invoke or events to listen to, and you can dive back into the slides to double check things, should you forget.

If you get stuck you can ask for hints.

Each time you use a hint, the number of points you can gain from the challenge drops, yes that’s right, there’s a points counter to entice you to complete the challenges.

To top it all off you get this nifty little public profile with badges to show what you’ve completed:

This site is just amazing, it really taking learning to a whole new level. You’re not stuck with boring old videos that you forget after you’ve finished watching an hour of content, you spend up to 20 minutes learning a bunch of new stuff which you can use right away in their predefined challenges and get feedback right away. It goes a long way to help you understand what you’re doing.

I highly recommend anyone wanting to learn Backbone, grab this course:

http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs

Or checkout some of the other courses available:

http://www.codeschool.com/courses

We have all seen these lists before, but I’ve decided I’ll make a list of all the software I use or think are a must have, blog it, then this time next year I can do the list again and see how much it’s changed.

Visual Studio 2010

What can I say, I’m a .NET Developer

ReSharper

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

This should just ship with Visual Studio, without ReSharper I feel so unproductive in VS.

MindScape Web Workbench

http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/web-workbench

This VS extension just gets better and better, I primarily got it to write LESS and CoffeeScript, but recently they added support for minifying and combining JavaScript and CSS files. Really cool stuff and I highly recommend it.

BugAid

http://www.bugaidsoftware.com/

This is a relatively new extension, it extends the debugging tools in Visual Studio and gives more information where it can. It was a little annoying at first, but they are listening to the community and fixing issues, adding features, it’s coming along nicely and I recommend it!

MightyMoose / NCrunch

http://www.continuoustests.com/ / http://www.ncrunch.net/

These two tools are the same taken from two different approaches with two different goals. As a result I’m really torn between them. I love features from both, and I’ve been using MightyMoose at work and NCrunch at home. NCrunch has code-coverage which Greg Young disagrees with. I guess that’s what’s stopping me from adopting LOLCats and Gary, and other cool features in MM.

PostgreSQL

http://www.postgresql.org/

One thing I don’t like about SQL Server, is having to install it and have it run all the time… But I’ve always loved PostgreSQL as well, and hated MySQL. (checkout Tekpubs “The Perils of MySQL” for a glimpse of why I don’t like it). Why I think this is a must have is I recently found out you don’t actually need to install it to run. This makes it great for a dev environment where you want to run up an instance on demand when you need it.

RavenDB

http://ravendb.net/

If you’re a .NET developer and not already looking at, or using RavenDB… I don’t know you… RavenDB makes working with a document database, fun, and easy to learn, and constantly blows my mind.

ILSpy

http://wiki.sharpdevelop.net/ilspy.ashx

Of all the reflection tools available I prefer ILSpy. No real reason it just works and is fast.

Sublime Text

http://www.sublimetext.com/

I used to be a massive fan of EditPlus, infact I’ve used it for over 10 years… But recently found Sublime text due to Tuts+ 30 Days to learn jQuery, and haven’t gone back to EditPlus. It has awesome plugin features.

NHProf

http://nhprof.com/

Since I tend to use NHibernate quite a bit, well not so much now that RavenDB is about, but when using NHibernate I use NHProf to view the generated queries. One really, really, really handy tool.

One of the cool features of the Web Workbench from Mindscape is the ability to generate the output files. Prior to using the Web Workbench I was using .LESS{} which uses an HTTP Handler to generate the output files for LESS.

The problem with this is sometimes I would write some CSS and not realise I missed something only to find my site doesn’t display anything, then I have to figure out what I did wrong.

With the Web Workbench, and it’s ability to generate the files every time I save, makes me less error prone.

But the most efficient way of working with it I found (when writing a lot of CSS in 1 sitting) is to split my windows so the first window has where I’m writing, and the second window has the generated CSS file.

If I make an error on the left side:

I see the error on the right.

If I make a change to the left, (added a background colour) i see the change on the right.

This makes it really handy when applying nested rules. Such as nesting a hover rule to an anchor tag. Sometimes I forget to include the colon.

Maybe in the next version of the Web Bench, Mindscape can include side-by-side windows that scroll with each other Tho it would be difficult depending on how much CSS was generated. Would still be a nice feature.

Either way, the Web Workbench is a tool that can’t be missed.

When we build website’s, more often than not we have: Separation of Concerns. Even if at most it’s just basic 3-tier Architecture

What annoys me though is a lot of time no one ever thinks about separation of concerns when it comes to the folder structure of their website, and where things go.

Folders

The one thing that annoys me above all else, is when ‘layout images’ (images for layout, design, styling etc) of the website, are shoved into the same folder that holds what I call “Content Images”.

For example:

root/
root/css/
root/images/

What I prefer to do is structure it so the css folder has it’s own images folder, specifically for layout images.

root/
root/css/
root/css/images/
root/images

To take it a step further, I often have images, icons, and fonts.

root/
root/css/
root/css/fonts/
root/css/icons/
root/css/images/
root/images

This way I don’t have to worry about finding specific icons in a folder full of images, I don’t have to worry about sifting through images to find ones related to the layout/design, they are all neatly tucked away in their own specific areas.

When it comes to folder structure however, NuGet gets in the way.

It would be nice if it allowed you to specify where file types should go. At the moment ‘css’ files seem to go into ‘Content’. JavaScript files go into ‘Scripts’. But what I would rather have is all lower-case names, and ‘css’ rather than ‘content’. Until then, I just download those sort of dependencies manually and create my own folder structure.

CSS

The next thing that I find annoying is the God Style Sheet. It’s the StyleSheet that people name:

Styles.css

It’s the only one that exists in the project, it’s over 100k in size, no comments, no christmas trees. Just lines and lines of fail.

The approach I used to take (before finding .LESS) was creating multiple StyleSheets that were small and easy to maintain, sometimes I would end up with up to 12, possibly more depending on the size of the website.

Each StyleSheet would be responsible for a specific task, so I would have something like the following:

/css/reset.css (this is just one of those many reset StyleSheets found on the net)
/css/layout.css
/css/main.css
/css/header.css
/css/footer.css
/css/main-navigation.css
/css/…

When sections of the website were broken down like this, it did require flicking between StyleSheets now-n-then, but they became much smaller and easier to maintain. I also became far-less at risk of Unwanted Side Effects.

Now with .LESS and LESS, it’s easy to have only a few StyleSheets, since now you can tab within a specific region and continue to write styles that only apply to that region.

For example, given a Footer element. You could come up with something like:

This would in turn generate the following CSS for you.

I find it much easier to manage writing ‘LESS’ then traditional CSS.

Conclusion

I didn’t want to go into too much detail, my main point is I think people should put a little more thought into how they structure their folders, files, naming, etc when creating websites. We focus so much time on trying to main our applications and code maintainable, but somehow neglect the website itself, and after a while we just end up fighting with it.

Every now-n-then I read threads on forums to do with pay & salary in the IT industry, and it always frustrates me when I come across posts where people are whinging about junior / no experience jobs being offered for ‘low pay’.

The latest thread can be seen here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1657193

In the thread the original poster was complaining about a job ad being advertised at 35-40k, for a grad position. It seems that a lot of people agree with him. Some of the comments are:

35k is shockingly low. You could walk out and get an office job with no training and no stress for that amount. As a grad you will have to be learning things in your spare time etc.

In IT you need to be good to get good money. If that”s not you then change your career, plenty of industries where you get good money even if you are just average or worse…

I still think it”s dangerous practice to offer an absolutely disgraceful salary like $35k to gradutes

35k is a a stupid sallary for a new Grad in this day and age. Heck, as a grad I would even consider 50k too low. Good luck trying to fill that role !!

And one of my favourites:

$35k is terrible… what”s the point of going to uni and graduating with a degree if 35k is all you get.. u might as well get a basic admin job that pays $40-50k…

That”s just a few of the comments from the first 4 pages of 19+ pages.

I don’t understand how people find this low, I don’t know how things work in America, but in Australia and New Zealand a grad student in IT simply cannot expect to work out of Uni and into a 100k job.

When I started working about 7 years ago at 18, I started on 35k. (for the record I never went to university, I did a couple of diplomas then started working).

I was discussing this with a good friend of mine, last night and he told me he started on $10.30/hr (about 21k), without asking him I bet he would say it was worth it, he’s very experienced and works for a great company.

I just don’t think grad students or ‘tafe’ (as it’s called in Australia) have the knowledge to sit down at a desk and cut code, you need to mentor them and hold their hand.

That’s not to say ALL grad/tafe students need to have their hand held, you may end up with someone like Mark Zuckerberg, but those types of people are different, Mark was doing programming in the 90’s when his father taught him BASIC.

I think the problem stems from the fact a lot of people get into programming because they think it’s easy money, sure with ~10 years experience and good references you can get 100k+, but you just don’t walk out of Uni or Tafe into that sort of money. Programming is more of a hobby than a career, it’s something you do because your passionate about it, not because you want to get paid lots. After you’ve been in the industry for… 15+ years? Then you can worry about being paid lots, but prior to that, should be happy you’re doing something you love.

I think 35k is justified because it actually costs the company you’re working for, to mentor you, and hold your hand for at-least the first year of your career.

After a year it’s easy to move up the food chain, that first year is the hardest to find a job, and I think it’s selfish to whinge for low pay, when an employer can’t rely on you to get a task done without asking a billion questions.

The excuse that you can get an admin job for 40-50k is silly, after a few years in such a role, you’re still going to be doing the same old boring shit, at least as a programmer you’re going to move up onto bigger and better projects, harder problems to solve, and what you seem to crave so much… more money.

</rant>

Over the past few days I’ve moved my blog from BlogEngine.Net to WordPress, since BlogEngine is fail.

I didn’t go with a hosted solution since it costs money just to use my own domain name, infact it costs more to use my own domain name than it cost me to register the damn thing. So I investigated blogs and came across:

http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server

Seems someone or somepeople have ported wordpress to work on SQL Server, so people who are on Windows with SQL Server and don’t want to use FailSQL MySQL can take advantage of wordpress.

As much as I hate PHP after moving to .Net, the one thing the PHP community did right was all the different CMS and Blog solutions out there, something the .Net community lacks. As far as I’m concerned there is not one good .Net blogging solution available.

Anyway so far I’m happy with the move.