When a problem does happen, it is put out like a fire and work shifts back to making required changes rather than trying to make sure that particular fire doesn't happen again.
I work at a web agency as one of two developers, and the reason this happens is quite simple.
You can't bill for fixing problems you've caused. You can bill for new work - so as far as management are concerned any problems should be fixed as fast as possible, and then forgotten about (until next time, when you have to explain you weren't given the time you said was needed to stop it happening again).
Web standards are doing a lot to create a semantic web without people having to think about it. We're fast moving from "this is a big red piece of text" to "this is a heading" thanks to CSS allowing us to state that headings should be big and red.
I doubt we're ever going to be in a position where every site is marked up with RDF metadata, but a lot of sites are now offering APIs that are good enough to do the job, sure we're unlikely to have a universal API that allows us to query any website on the internet and extract the data we're looking for, but realistically what would that actually gain us?
Services such as Froogle provide a bridge between your average e-commerce site with products listed on it, and microformats are going a long way towards allowing people to build sites that are semantic enough to do the job - for example, most people aren't interested in getting the About Us page of a corporate site, they just want the contact details.
I think we're going to see a lot more almost-standards around the web, which provide a common way to mark up certain parts of a page, without having to go to the trouble of adding RDF metadata to everything that gets built.
Can anyone else comment on this - I'm currently considering doing a CS type degree (probably at the University of Surrey) after a couple of years working as a web developer. I'm getting bored of building brochureware sites, and would really like to diversify my skills into client side development and the other interesting parts of computing.
If the parent's comments are accurate though, I will probably do some technical qualifications instead, since my objective would be to learn more about how to develop software, and getting a degree would be a bonus.
Having found out about the mess Exchange makes of forwarding yesterday, I'm afraid it's just as complicated as it sounds, especially since several steps give you the option of starting unrelated wizards along the way.
Lying catches up with the company eventually. Unfortunately it often does not catch up with the salesperson doing the lying.
So true it hurts - I'm the developer who gets to implement whatever BS sales have sold to a client this week. Usually by the end of the day. Without delaying any of the other projects I'm working on.
Agreed - get out of this situation now. I work as a web developer for an design agency, and the projects that go wrong are almost always the ones where our client contact is in sales.
The worst is a multi-lingual site providing an online product catalogue. The site itself works, but getting translations is a nightmare. For example I was once given an Italian translation for the site, where the only reference point as to which words are translated is the odd German word, an =, and then a long list of Italian phrases.
The sad thing is I'd sent them a spreadsheet (the common language of sales) containing lots of blank spaces to fill in, clearly they just didn't like the idea of that, but they were still furious when we pointed out we need it in the right format to be able to work it. A year later, we're still going back and forth with them.
Sadly vertical centering *should* be easy. There's the "vertical-align" property, which in theory sets the vertical alignment, and even has the option of specifying "middle".
But in their infinite wisdom it can only be applied to table cells, and inline blocks - I can understand table cells, but the last thing I want to be able to vertical align is inline blocks, which generally aren't tall enough to bother aligning.
There's XML, which while not ideal because some things can be misinterpreted if you don't understand the schema correctly, but it does embed information on *what* the data you've got is to a certain extent.
If something is unclear, they could also add comments, that can provide some pointers for our future ancestors, although that does rely on certain assumptions, such as the use of the same encodings for characters.
Excellent advice - I'm starting out in the design/development world as a web developer for a small agency, and there's nothing as good for learning your trade as being the guy that can get things done.
Over the past week, I've done a huge variety of things, including working with an incredibly talented developer at our sister company to get a brochure generated from a product database that already existed. Sadly I didn't get home until 2am yesterday, but hey - it's all experience!
The most likely thing to have happened is someone putting a typo in the URL, if they had been running tests on it, then it would probably have been caught, but presumably it was seen as one of those small projects that doesn't really need a proper QA process.
It's a tool for Adwords optimization - you give the application some blocks of your page, and several variations of the content for them, and then a percentage of your visitors get each version.
This allows you to try out different sets of content, and see which one leads to the most conversions (software downloads, sales, enquiries etc.), and hopefully save some money at the same time. We have several clients you are spending over £1000/month on Adwords, and it really pays to be able to see what works.
I feel for you - I'm working at a small design/web agency which seems to be populated by people who really want to avoid knowing anything about how the web, or the tools we use work.
The problem here is that it's very cultural - the manager doesn't want to know the details, and refuses to accept that squirting ink on a piece of paper is not something you can compare developing web applications to - I'm building a site for his other company at the moment, and one of the "specifications" is that all content for a page should be visible without scrolling.
And I put specifications in quotes, because his idea of giving a spec is to draw a couple of interface ideas, wave at it, call you Reg a lot, and then wrap up the meeting. Any questions about processes get waved away as details, and then when the project is over budget, past deadline, and nothing like what the client asked for, it's our fault.
It's for that reason that frameworks are much more important then fully developed CMSs.
If you've got a good framework, you can quickly build an application that does what the client want's it to do (and no more!), rather then going through the process of customising an application so it kinda fits their needs, but never really quite gets there.
If you havn't tried out Rails or Django yet I'd really recommend it - I was playing with Django over the weekend, and it features an admin system which far exceeds Rails' scaffolding - and allows customisation without having to rip it all out and start again.
If the code is never meant to be run, what's it doing there?
I'm not trying to flame you - I just don't understand why you'd leave code that's never meant to be run sitting around the code base, and take the effort to write more code to make sure it doesn't get run. Surely the best way to make sure code isn't running is to remove it from the codebase.
I'm with 246o1 on this one, as one of my best friends spent several years sleeping on benches in London, and had a major drink and drug problem, and her kids were taken into care - she finished college a couple of years ago, and is now working for a security firm while she goes through University, and has her own flat.
Anyone can be helped, they just need to want that help. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is most definately possible, and an inspiration for anybody who actually talks to people who havn't had the easy life so many of us are used to.
As much as I'd love to think of myself as a good programmer, I doubt I could even work out what had corrupted the image in that time, never mind write a program to fix it.
The event sounds like an interesting idea though, does anybody know if you can get a video of it (no, I havn't RTFAed) - I'd be interested to see what sort of stuff they were doing on the screens to make debugging errors more interesting then they sound.
It's just like DDR. But you wear full body flame proof suits while playing, so that you don't get incinerated when the flame thrower fires after you screw up a move.
It's criminal negligence that our government took 5 days to get food and water (and law and order) to these people.
Where did you hear they have law and order? I'm transcribing the NOPD radio net at the moment, and a couple of hours ago there was call out because a sniper was causing problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at a web agency as one of two developers, and the reason this happens is quite simple.
You can't bill for fixing problems you've caused. You can bill for new work - so as far as management are concerned any problems should be fixed as fast as possible, and then forgotten about (until next time, when you have to explain you weren't given the time you said was needed to stop it happening again).
Web standards are doing a lot to create a semantic web without people having to think about it. We're fast moving from "this is a big red piece of text" to "this is a heading" thanks to CSS allowing us to state that headings should be big and red.
I doubt we're ever going to be in a position where every site is marked up with RDF metadata, but a lot of sites are now offering APIs that are good enough to do the job, sure we're unlikely to have a universal API that allows us to query any website on the internet and extract the data we're looking for, but realistically what would that actually gain us?
Services such as Froogle provide a bridge between your average e-commerce site with products listed on it, and microformats are going a long way towards allowing people to build sites that are semantic enough to do the job - for example, most people aren't interested in getting the About Us page of a corporate site, they just want the contact details.
I think we're going to see a lot more almost-standards around the web, which provide a common way to mark up certain parts of a page, without having to go to the trouble of adding RDF metadata to everything that gets built.
Thanks, that's exactly the sort of information I was looking for, I'll try to get hold of some syllabuses.
Can anyone else comment on this - I'm currently considering doing a CS type degree (probably at the University of Surrey) after a couple of years working as a web developer. I'm getting bored of building brochureware sites, and would really like to diversify my skills into client side development and the other interesting parts of computing.
If the parent's comments are accurate though, I will probably do some technical qualifications instead, since my objective would be to learn more about how to develop software, and getting a degree would be a bonus.
Having found out about the mess Exchange makes of forwarding yesterday, I'm afraid it's just as complicated as it sounds, especially since several steps give you the option of starting unrelated wizards along the way.
So true it hurts - I'm the developer who gets to implement whatever BS sales have sold to a client this week. Usually by the end of the day. Without delaying any of the other projects I'm working on.
Needless to say, I'm looking for a new job.
Agreed - get out of this situation now. I work as a web developer for an design agency, and the projects that go wrong are almost always the ones where our client contact is in sales.
The worst is a multi-lingual site providing an online product catalogue. The site itself works, but getting translations is a nightmare. For example I was once given an Italian translation for the site, where the only reference point as to which words are translated is the odd German word, an =, and then a long list of Italian phrases.
The sad thing is I'd sent them a spreadsheet (the common language of sales) containing lots of blank spaces to fill in, clearly they just didn't like the idea of that, but they were still furious when we pointed out we need it in the right format to be able to work it. A year later, we're still going back and forth with them.
Sadly vertical centering *should* be easy. There's the "vertical-align" property, which in theory sets the vertical alignment, and even has the option of specifying "middle".
But in their infinite wisdom it can only be applied to table cells, and inline blocks - I can understand table cells, but the last thing I want to be able to vertical align is inline blocks, which generally aren't tall enough to bother aligning.
There's XML, which while not ideal because some things can be misinterpreted if you don't understand the schema correctly, but it does embed information on *what* the data you've got is to a certain extent.
If something is unclear, they could also add comments, that can provide some pointers for our future ancestors, although that does rely on certain assumptions, such as the use of the same encodings for characters.
Excellent advice - I'm starting out in the design/development world as a web developer for a small agency, and there's nothing as good for learning your trade as being the guy that can get things done.
Over the past week, I've done a huge variety of things, including working with an incredibly talented developer at our sister company to get a brochure generated from a product database that already existed. Sadly I didn't get home until 2am yesterday, but hey - it's all experience!
The most likely thing to have happened is someone putting a typo in the URL, if they had been running tests on it, then it would probably have been caught, but presumably it was seen as one of those small projects that doesn't really need a proper QA process.
It's a tool for Adwords optimization - you give the application some blocks of your page, and several variations of the content for them, and then a percentage of your visitors get each version.
This allows you to try out different sets of content, and see which one leads to the most conversions (software downloads, sales, enquiries etc.), and hopefully save some money at the same time. We have several clients you are spending over £1000/month on Adwords, and it really pays to be able to see what works.
I feel for you - I'm working at a small design/web agency which seems to be populated by people who really want to avoid knowing anything about how the web, or the tools we use work.
The problem here is that it's very cultural - the manager doesn't want to know the details, and refuses to accept that squirting ink on a piece of paper is not something you can compare developing web applications to - I'm building a site for his other company at the moment, and one of the "specifications" is that all content for a page should be visible without scrolling.
And I put specifications in quotes, because his idea of giving a spec is to draw a couple of interface ideas, wave at it, call you Reg a lot, and then wrap up the meeting. Any questions about processes get waved away as details, and then when the project is over budget, past deadline, and nothing like what the client asked for, it's our fault.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
It's for that reason that frameworks are much more important then fully developed CMSs.
If you've got a good framework, you can quickly build an application that does what the client want's it to do (and no more!), rather then going through the process of customising an application so it kinda fits their needs, but never really quite gets there.
If you havn't tried out Rails or Django yet I'd really recommend it - I was playing with Django over the weekend, and it features an admin system which far exceeds Rails' scaffolding - and allows customisation without having to rip it all out and start again.
If the code is never meant to be run, what's it doing there?
I'm not trying to flame you - I just don't understand why you'd leave code that's never meant to be run sitting around the code base, and take the effort to write more code to make sure it doesn't get run. Surely the best way to make sure code isn't running is to remove it from the codebase.
I'm with 246o1 on this one, as one of my best friends spent several years sleeping on benches in London, and had a major drink and drug problem, and her kids were taken into care - she finished college a couple of years ago, and is now working for a security firm while she goes through University, and has her own flat.
Anyone can be helped, they just need to want that help. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is most definately possible, and an inspiration for anybody who actually talks to people who havn't had the easy life so many of us are used to.
As much as I'd love to think of myself as a good programmer, I doubt I could even work out what had corrupted the image in that time, never mind write a program to fix it.
The event sounds like an interesting idea though, does anybody know if you can get a video of it (no, I havn't RTFAed) - I'd be interested to see what sort of stuff they were doing on the screens to make debugging errors more interesting then they sound.
You forgot to mention the definitive end of any game of Risk:
"I'm dropping a nuke on you... the world has just been wiped out."
Looks like Ruby to me, although it's a little to verbose ;)
0..9 { |i| puts i }
So... Emacs or VIm?
Which is it gonna be?
I liked the Dance Dance Immolation.
It's just like DDR. But you wear full body flame proof suits while playing, so that you don't get incinerated when the flame thrower fires after you screw up a move.
Home does not include the Remote Desktop client for doing tech support, or Windows Server domain support.
I think home only supports up to 2 processors as well, but not certain on that one.
And Pro is blue.
Things are certainly calming down in the area at the moment, but saying that law and order has been restored seems premature at the moment.
Where did you hear they have law and order? I'm transcribing the NOPD radio net at the moment, and a couple of hours ago there was call out because a sniper was causing problems.
Last night bomb squad were called out.
People are already dropping food, and providing medical attention.
No one is suggesting that internet access be installed instead of dropping food, they're doing it as well as dropping food.