Development

In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.
So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.

As part of our recent site upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we had a bunch of content profiles to clean up.

Over the past couple weeks, I've updated the Drupal Dojo Toolkit module to support the new AMD module layout and asynchronous loading.

Via the Seattle Tech Startups list, I came across probably the most vehement, well-written, detailed critique of the PHP language I have seen yet.

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on why customers complain about Drupal -- the short version is that they either had incorrect expectations, or "developers" who were in over their heads.

Did you notice? The world's a different place. Rules for doing business have changed—there's new ways of getting hired, finding employees, reaching new customers, and (shudder) for them to reach you. Economies of scale have flipped—it's getting more expensive to do things on a huge scale, and far cheaper to do them at a micro scale. Mass market items have lost their appeal, and people yearn for authentic, individual connections in a world of franchise same-ness.

"I just want a simple, static website."

OK. Why?

"I don't want to spend the extra money on a CMS. I don't have time to manage a site. I don't know HTML. I just want something quick."

OK.

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

At Freelock, we're big fans of the Dojo Toolkit. It's a Javascript library for providing data-backed widgets in web applications, on-the-fly graphing, animations, and much more.

Jedi mind tricks for getting your web site done

We see it all the time. Our clients hire us to get a web site put together. We build it, provide tools, training, and everything, and then it sits there on our development server, waiting for them to finish writing up those new pages they wanted to add. Weeks go by. Then months. And in a couple cases, years.