Someone asked me an interesting question earlier this week that got me thinking quite a bit.  Someone had a son that was interested in building web based applications and wanted to know what they should learn first.  The answer to this question could have many answers depending on who it was asked to.  Should they start with a scripting language (PHP, ColdFusion) or should they start with a more object oriented language (Java, .NET)?

I feel that one should start by learning the core basics of programming.  Get your mind thinking in a logical way that allows you to solve problems.  After all, that is essentially what programming is: You are solving a problem.  I am not sure that learning a script based language would fully accomplish this.  I ended up recommending .NET (C#) to start learning the fundamentals, then moving on from there. 

If someone asked you this question, what would your answer be?  I am very curious to hear the opinions of others on this topic, as I get asked this question more and more.

As some of you know, I accepted a new management position at work a few weeks ago.  Since then we have been receiving resumes and interviewing folks to take over my old position as a senior engineer.  Going through this process, many pet peeves I have are appearing.  This is just a quick list of things I have seen that chap my rear:

• If you claim to have been proficient in ColdFusion for 10+ years, then you should know the correct spelling of the product name.  It’s ColdFusion and NOT Cold Fusion.  You would think one would have noticed that after using it for 10 years!
• It’s the year 2009.  Do you really think it’s necessary to list on you resume you are proficient in Windows 3.1?  Seriously?
• So you know Pascal?  That will come in handy into today’s world wide web programming!  Pascal is most widely using a language to teach you the basics, not for programming web applications.
• I’m also glad to see that you know Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.  You will be a better programmer just by knowing those two software applications.
• When I ask you if you have experience in programming custom e-commerce sites, you cannot reply by saying you use Magento and Miva as plug in play applications.  I am amazed by how many folks in this field have never created their own shopping cart, even in the jest of learning.
• I know the economy is not great at the moment, and lots of folks need jobs.  But please, do not send in your resume to every open job you see when you are  not qualified, or not even in that field of expertise.  I have spent hours reading through resumes of people in totally unrelated fields to what the job was requiring.
• So I see your resume shows you have knowledge of .NET right?  No, not really?  You have only read a book or blog post on it?  If you list out a language on your resume, you need to have real world experience in using it.  
• It’s really not cool to list EVERY current industry buzzword in your resume, some of which you do not know the meaning of!
• If you email or upload you resume, do not name it resume.pdf or resume.doc.  Name the file with your name, so it does not get overwritten by the next person who sends in resume.pdf.

Update: After receiving some emails on this topic,  I just wanted to add that a lot of these are tips.  I am not saying that if I saw this on a resume I would immediately deem you unfit for the job.  Some are more of a courtesy, like naming your resume first_last.pdf instead of resume.pdf for example.  If candidate A and candidate B are equal skill wise, maybe the fact that one candidate was a little more truthful in their resume would lead them to land a job.  Last of all, these are strictly my opinion!  They are not right or wrong for everyone.

A few weeks ago I was offered, and accepted, a new position of Production Manager at work.  I officially started the new role last week and should be fully transitioned over this week.  The lack of posts here has suffered, as I’ve spent a lot of time getting things in order for the new position.  My previous job as a senior engineer involved day to day coding , database work and some architect work of solutions.  My new role is a management role, and I will be in charge of the day to day responsibilities and scheduling of our staff.  I will still be able to write some code every now and then to keep my skills polished.  I am very excited about my new role and look forward to new challenges.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be able to spend a little more time again on the blog.  My next post will cover some pet peeves of interviews.  We have been interviewing folks to take over my old position, and this has brought to light some of the types of things you see and hear during interviews.

Yesterday afternoon ESPN released a memo to it’s employees detailing guidelines in their social media policy. I’m not sure they were really guidelines, but appear to say you cannot participate in any social media conversations that involve sports (without prior approval from your department head). You can judge the policy yourself by reading the memo as sent to Mashable.

Last night Google dropped some very big news to the world: Google Chrome OS. Yes, you heard that right, Google will be releasing a new operating system. From the small details that were revealed, the OS will be based on a Linux kernel and will first be targeted to netbooks and will be open source. Google is already working with hardware vendors and claim you will be able to purchase a netbook powered by Google Chrome OS sometime in 2010.

The interesting piece of this news is the OS will be built in a way that most of the user experience will take place over the web. So according to Google your apps that run on the new OS will also be able to be used on any of standards compliant web browsers. I was surprised at this news as I am sure some other makers out there were as well.

You can read the full post from Google on their blog.

For those of you who own or maintain sites that use Authorize.NET to process transactions, you may have noticed a severe outage of the service over the weekend. Twitter was abuzz with the issues that according to the folks at Authorize.Net was due to a fire at their main data center. Apparantly this affected all of the company’s systems, even their backup systems. Whatever happened to someone making sure their was not a single point of failure?

I have been interested lately in the various areas of warfare in our current times. The major focus of current situations WILL involve cyber warfare as part of any conflict. Many folks are under the impression that conflicts between other countries than their own really will not change their lives that much. If you are of this belief, read the post titled Collateral Damage written by Robert X. Cringely on is blog. He lays out the ripple effect of a cyber warfare in other countries, for example a conflict between India and Pakistan. With a great deal of large companies outsourcing work to these countries, any type of cyber attack could be devastating. As Cringely points out an attack could cripple customer support for many banks and PC companies or even attack source code repositories.

It is a well written post that will leave most people stunned once they consider the “what if” scenarios. I totally agree with Cringely that any conflict in the modern era will have a cyber warfare component. I would also argue that the first “shots” fired in a conflict could very well happen in the cyber world.

Today’s topic is not a new one, at least for me. I have seen some tweets the last few days that has brought this topic back up for discussion: The quality of good web hosting.

I will go ahead and say right off the top that I am in the camp of believers who say you get exactly what you pay for with web hosting. If are paying $5 a month to host a site, you are going to get $5 of service and performance. Believe me, I know this from past experience! When I first started developing web applications I would look for the cheapest place around and give them a go. Over the years I have used a great number of these lower end web hosts, especially in the ColdFusion arena. I was never 100% happy with the performance or the level of support. I then began diving into the system administration world at my job some and began to learn everything that goes into maintaining web and database servers. I quickly saw the value of paying for a good web host.

The cheap shared hosting plans can have numerous problems if you to choose to go this route. Your site will be sitting on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other sites. So your site’s performance is dependent of a number of factors ranging from hardware issues to bad code written by other developers. If one site is hacked into on the server your site could also be at risk. Support is another drawback to most cheap shared web hosts. They have thousands of customers who are paying in the cheap, so your wait time for customer service can be painfully long in some cases.

I run across clients quite often that have some rather large web applications they spent good money on, but still choose to go the cheapest route for their web hosting. If they care about their applications, it’s not too long before they see the light and are forced to look elsewhere.

Not too long after my experience with shared web hosting and my increase in system admin knowledge I decided to bite the bullet and set up a high end VPS account with a top level web host. I could then use the knowledge I had gained over the years to tune my VPS to my desired settings. If I needed to change something in the ColdFusion Administrator, no problem. Need to upgrade my .NET framework level? No problem there either. The level of support I currently receive is off the charts. The hosting company has dedicated staff who deal only with VPS customers, so help is only minutes away. And best of all, my applications perform great and the up time is not reliant on having hundreds of other sites on my server. Now, with these added benefits it does come with an increased cost. The cost is worth it to me to have good performance and high availability for my clients.

For those of you that follow this blog, you know I was looking for a web based code snippet library. After checking out some of the ones I came across I ended up making the decision to use a WordPress blog for the library. It has everything I needed out of the box (categories, tags, multiple authors, RSS etc…). The only two pieces I needed to add in were a code highlighter (which there are many of) and most importantly a mechanism to allow me to make the entire blog private. I did not want the general public to come across the code snippets, nor did I want the blog indexed. I was surprised to see that out of the box WordPress does not offer this feature. After a quick search I came across a new plugin named Absolute Privacy written by John Kolbert. This plugin does exactly what I needed to do. Once you download the plugin all you need to do is go to the settings page and check a box that enables the feature. By doing this your entire blog is protected via login. So far this has worked well, and WordPress is doing it’s normal good job.