The Way I See It

I had been using Dreamweaver for development as long as I can remember; 10 years at least. When I started my new job 6 months ago I was told that nearly all the ColdFusion developers used it and it was no big deal to get a license. However, not too much later I got the itch to try a new editor. I saw some tweets concerning Package Control – once you have this installed, you have a resource within ST2 to install and manage a vast array of plugins.

From with the package manager I installed: ColdFusion for CF syntax functionality.

Automatic Backups. This is awesome. When you save a file, a backup will be saved to a local folder. It's almost like having a built in versioning system. This works great for me at work because all our development files are stored on the network. Recently a snafu occurred and an important folder was deleted. Backups were restored from the night before, but because of automatic backups I had a backup of all my work from up to a few minutes ago.

BracketHighlighter can be good for keeping your sanity. When you highlight an opening brace, bracket or parenthesis, it will highlight the closing match for it. If you do work in javascript or jquery, I would consider this a must have!

TrailingSpaces is something small with a big impact, for me. All it does is highlight any time a line ends in a space. This may seem like nothing, but we have a standard that specifically addresses this. If a line of code ends with a space, you will fail your code review. So this is a great frustation saver.

If you are frustrated with your current IDE/editor or just looking for something different give Sublime Text 2 a shot. I don't think you will be disappointed.

This entry was posted on January 3, 2013 at 1:39 PM and has received 115 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

As a web developer I want my projects to accomplish 2 things. I want to exceed the expectations of my client and provide the user with a good experience. A lot of developers get into the mindset of "if it works, I'm done". They don't take the opportunity to make sure the users are going to have a good experience. I don't blame them. It's tedious to test compatibility and boring to make sure your error catching gracefully handles issues that may arise. But, ironically, a slow load time can quickly ruin a users website experience. I break load-time into 2 categories: real and perceived. Real load-time is the actual time it takes all elements and scripting to be 100% loaded and ready. Perceived load-time is the wait-time a user experiences before they can start using a site. A "fast" site optimizes for the former, while exploiting the latter. So, here are 3 things techniques I use to affect page load-time without affecting my coding.

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This entry was posted on January 30, 2012 at 4:18 PM and has received 399 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

As processing power has increased, data caching has jumped to the forefront and user-demand for immediate response has grown, developers seem to have moved away from batch processing. But in a lot of situations, this can be a better approach than real-time processing.

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This entry was posted on January 18, 2012 at 1:21 PM and has received 400 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

When I first started writing Coldfusion applications I was very naive about data and architecture. I can admit it. I did not use components and I wrote (and often re-wrote) queries in-line when needed. As my development matured and I began to more fully understand SQL Server as an independent platform I recognized my failures.

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This entry was posted on January 14, 2012 at 6:39 PM and has received 442 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

My friends know I am a huge fan of the tv show The West Wing, hence the title of this post. As I was writing my post on using stored procedures, this one slapped me in the head and began forcing its way out. Too often developers think their language of choice is the end-all be-all of the development world. As a result they force it to do every necessary function when sometimes other tools, already readily available, can provide not only a better method, but can lead to exponential performance gains.

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This entry was posted on January 14, 2012 at 4:25 PM and has received 314 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A post in a troubleshooting forum on Linked In got me thinking about query optimization. The original poster asked about identifying and solving deadlock situations. Many great responses preceded mine, but it got me thinking about how I troubleshoot these problems. So I thought I would write it up over a series of posts.

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This entry was posted on January 11, 2012 at 3:48 PM and has received 325 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

It has been a while since I have been excited about development. I hope that today signifies a change in that. I spent most of the day doing some freebie work for one of my clients. You see, I downloaded the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit for IIS 7 today.

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This entry was posted on January 1, 2012 at 11:14 PM and has received 352 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A while back I wrote a very quick photo gallery system for a client. Through a management console, they upload a photo and the server, utilizing CF8's CFIMAGE tag resizes the image to a web-safe size. Today I received an email from the client saying "It tells me every time that the photos I am trying to add are too big". I knew I wasn't checking the file size and there was no way the client was trying to upload a photo of over 100MB (server-defined post data limit). So I got to debugging.

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This entry was posted on December 29, 2011 at 6:28 PM and has received 346 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

One of the things I think is cool about BlogCFC is that "out of the box" it tracks article views and shows that count in the administration panel. But I was bummed that each time I viewed the page it got counted. I figured it would be no big deal to add an IP Exclusion list and just not add those views. Then I noticed something peculiar. As I write this, I have no delusions about how many people are reading my words. So why did it seem that those views were going up by 2 when I viewed them?

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This entry was posted on December 23, 2011 at 5:10 AM and has received 324 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

My girlfriend and I went to the movies tonight to catch Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Before last week, when we watched M:I 3, she had never seen any of the series. I own the Blue-Ray set. That said, we both really enjoyed it.

No spoilers here, but I thought it was shot well with a good story and the requisite over-the-top OMG-how the-hell-did-he-get-out-of-that stunts that are an M:I signature. If a friend asked me to go see it with them, I would certainly go see it again. I thought Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town) more than held his own opposite Tom Cruise.

If you liked any of the previous movies in the series, I think this one is worth checking out. If you haven't but want to see this one anyway, I suggest watching M:I 3 first. You don't need to know everything about the series, but this installment certainly pulls a little from the previous.

This entry was posted on December 23, 2011 at 2:57 AM and has received 180 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.