I Want to be on the Beach!

Just over ten years ago when I worked as a Smalltalk consultant I mentored a developer transitioning to Smalltalk from VB. He was clearly excited about what Smalltalk could do, so much so that he would go home and bore his not-so-technical girlfriend with his new found passion. In trying to put into layman's terms what he was experiencing he described it like this...

"programming in VB is like writing documentation, programming in Smalltalk is like writing poetry"

I have been working with Java now for so many years that I'd almost forgotten that software development could be truly enjoyable. Then a few days ago I found Seaside. I have worked a number of Java frameworks over the past few years: Struts, JSF, Tapestry and Wicket (in my opinion the pick of the Java frameworks) but nothing can come within a 1000 miles of what I've been able to do in just a few hours of playing with Seaside. There aren't enough superlatives to describe how good Seaside is. Avi Bryant I salute you!

If you're reading this from some dreary office in the middle of winter and wishing you we're on a beach somewhere then my advice is get to the Seaside a play a while. You might just remember how good it felt to be a child with a bucket and spade and a vast expanse beach to explore.

What happened to quality?

My builder puts in a new staircase and when the handrail goes in there's not enough room for your fingers where it passes through the top floor. This is not just unsightly but dangerous. So I tell him I want it changed and he umms and errs and mutters under his breath about knowing it was wrong when his joiner first did it. So why doesn't he tell the joiner to fix it way back when it first became apparent?

Presumably it will cost time and money to put it right and maybe the customer will just accept the status quo. Well not this customer. The stairs are now rectified and obviously the builder has had to cover the cost and is left to muse that it is cheaper to put something right as soon as you spot the error than to carry on regardless (maybe I'll introduce him to some Japanese quality manufacturing theory!).

So today I visit my church website www.emcf.net only the see that someone in the office has added content that makes the centre column shorter than the right and left columns. This should be no problem Firefox is fine with it. But as you might guess IE throws a wobbly. The bottom of the page disappears, remarkably though if you navigate away and come back to the page it's fine!

So I now have to spend a wad of time trying to work around another quality failure that should have been put right during unit testing when the problem first occurred. Maybe I should introduce Bill Gates the same Japanese manufacturing theory or send him a copy of Kent Beck's "Test Driven Development". I could just accept this poor quality as the status quo or I could make my own little protest. So here goes...

...DON'T USE IE! Try this www.mozilla.com/firefox

Two Pennies!

So everyone else gets to say what they think and I figured it was about time I added my voice to the millions already blogging.

Been busy doing some development work on our church website recently and had a number of people say "Why don't we create an area for blogging?". I then offer to put links to any of their blogs onto the site only to find out that none of them have one. So now I've got one.

Why two-pennies?

Well to be truthful my life is too full to nail me down to one topic, so if you're looking for a single theme then I guess this blogs not for you. If on the other hand you want journey with me through a hectic life of software development, managing a business, church leadership, father of four and living in a building project then please stick around and feel free to respond to my ramblings. Can't promise to post often but will at least try to be ineteresting.