August 7, 2007 | In Development | No Comments
This is a good piece on hiring good programmers.
The author discuss the wisdom of hiring a few good programmers rather than many average programmers, and how this can ultimately bring benefits. It is written from an American perspective, and talks about Perl developers, but I think it really hits the nail on the head. Something I particularly agree with is the following statement from the article:
Experience is key, but not necessarily in ways you might imagine. Time in the saddle, with a particular language is not as important as diversity of experience. Someone who has worked in several disparate industries, a generalist, is often a much better developer than one who has spent years in the same industry.
I have worked in a company where they only employ the best people, not one of whom was an IT graduate, as developers and analysts. Those people were able to develop in any language or methodology needed to fit the situation, because they were adaptable and bright enough to apply experience.
August 6, 2007 | In Development | No Comments
I wrote a short piece a while ago about the issues with running a Visual Studio website as root (see here), the solution being provided by a work around detailed by Scott Gu in his blog.
Microsoft has now provided a proper solution through the Visual Studio service pack 1. This allows you to specify in the properties of the web site root the virtual path and whether to allow Visual Studio to assign a port number dynamically. The only issue with this was an index out of bounds error when pre-compiling the site. Microsoft then issued a fix for this.
You can find details on Scott Gu’s blog again.
August 1, 2007 | In Development | No Comments
I finally made time today to make some changes to our e-commerce product, e-Posit.
This was built reasonably rapidly to bring it to market and start the search engines ranking it. It uses ASP.NET and AJAX technologies and is WorldPay Store Builder certified.
Anyhow, I’ve finally implemented SQL full-text searching, so the store is now searchable using wildcards and near text searches. I’ve had this in the pipeline for ages, but finding time at the moment is very hard.
I’ve also started implementing some of the new AJAX controls that have been released (see the ASP.NET site here). They are community developed, along with Microsoft, and make my life much easier as I just don’t have the time to recreate the kind of functionality they produce.
I expect they will be making their way into many of our sites in the near future :)