Praj's Site » Programming

That’s nice, but we never use it

praj — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:29:40 +0000

Not the words you want to be hearing from your users if you are a developer on a web site or application. Unfortunately it happens more often than you would think. A fantastic new feature is dreamed up and added. It’s tested thoroughly, it looks really good, it will save heaps of time. But no one uses it. Why? Because it isn’t needed.

Its an easy trap to fall into and I don’t always think its the developer’s fault. I’ve seen more than few cases where the analyst has misunderstood (read: not correctly identified) what the user needs and that has been translated into code by the developer. You also tend to get users that want things that seem like a good idea at the time (to them) but isn’t something they will ever use.

A good way to avoid this situation is to follow the advice from Getting Real, a free eBook from 37 signals, the company behind BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails among other things. In the chapter on feature selection, they point out that you should Start with No. This might seem harsh, but it makes perfect sense. Every feature you add is a burden. It requires ongoing maintenance. As suggested in the book, you should look for trends — reoccurring requests before you add something new.

My basic strategy for adding a new feature into a web site or system after it has gone live is something like this:

Is there a workaround for the feature?
Yes -> don’t fix it.
No -> Next question.

Has the feature been requested before?
Yes -> Next question.
No -> Say no (nicely). Don’t fix a system used by hundreds/thousands/millions of people just because of one request.

Is this feature going to be difficult to implement?
Yes -> Say no (nicely) based on the difficulty. Wait for it to come up again.
No -> Next question.

Does the feature add value?
Yes -> consider it. Make sure it is given a low priority for now. Wait for more requests for that feature before moving it up.
No -> Say no (nicely) due to more important priorities.

This my seem quite harsh, but it helps to reduce the amount of new features you are adding to a site or system, and lets you concentrate on fixing up any existing bugs.

Unfortunately this won’t always work if you work at a relatively large organisation where you generally have to do whatever is requested. However, you can still try to apply this approach. Remember every feature you add is something you will potentially have to support and maintain in the future …

Dev-Test-Prod

praj — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:51:07 +0000

Coming from an enterprise application background (PeopleSoft), I’m used to the dev-test-prod development paradigm:

Develop and unit test in the dev environment
Migrate and functional/integration test in the test environment
Release to the prod environment

This is such a ingrained process to me that I thought maybe I should question whether it applies to web site development?

Stepping back for a moment, I believe the main reason you approach development this way is to mitigate risk. In other words don’t release to the world until something has been fully tested. Admittedly this seems like a very good idea if you are making a change to a process that updates customer accounts and a small bug could lead to being out by a few million dollars. However, does it make as much sense in world of web development?

I believe it does. It lets you isolate a problem come up with a fix which you can then test before you release. If you couldn’t do this, say you simply created a fix in production what impact would it have? Well in most cases, probably none, but say your fix broke your entire site. Uh oh, now what? Restore from backup? When did you do the last backup … ?

Speaking of backups I think the two fall into exactly the same category: you use the dev-test-prod paradigm just in case your fix doesn’t work. Just like you backup your data just in case your hard drive crashes. So I’m sticking to it.

Web Development Screencasts

praj — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:02:58 +0000

I like learning web development skills by watching screencasts. They allow you ton see what’s being changed as its happening and you can pause and rewind as much as you need to.

Here’s a list of some really good screencasts sites and some specific screencasts that may be of interest:

Sites

ASP.net

ASP.NET from scratch

CSS

Essential CSS for every developer (a basic overview of CSS)
A detailed look at 960 grid system

General Web Development

JavaScript

PHP

Diving into PHP

Ruby on Rails

WordPress

I’ll try to keep this post updated as I find more good screencasts.

ActionMailer Timeouts

praj — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:20:05 +0000

Using action mailer on my rails application, I was getting Timeout::Error messages in my phusion passenger logs when sending email through SMTP. However, testing the application locally on my PC, the emails were being sent without a problem. I came across this post in the Site5 forums which suggested changing the actual address in my SMTP configuration to localhost which fixed the issue.

A Rails Searchable API

praj — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:22:27 +0000

Available from RailsAPI.com, you can either browse it online or download it and open it locally in your web browser. Fantastic stuff.

Learn Rails Quickly with the Flitter screencast

praj — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:24:06 +0000

The Flitter screencast series by Eric Berry (Teach Me to Code) is perhaps one of the best screencasts for learning Ruby on Rails quickly. It is a 6 part series and goes through the entire process of creating a Twitter-like clone in Rails. Perhaps the best thing about the screencast is that it is largely unedited so you can see Eric’s thought process as he develops the application.

Fonts

praj — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:12:30 +0000

Software Development Fonts

Consolas is my favourite development font. It is also the one that Jeff Atwood uses. Also check out his article on Programmer Fonts for some other good development fonts. Consolas comes with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005+ but who’s going to install that to get a font? You can get the font here.

Bitstream Vera is used by Gnome and is a really good family of fonts.

Why worry about fonts for programming? Happy with Courier New? Have a read of this.

Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts

These are the core fonts used by Microsoft Windows and include:

Andale
Arial
Comic Sans
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Times New Roman
Trebuchet
Verdana
Webdings

The unaltered .exe files for these fonts can be downloaded here. The Cabextract RPM package for Linux systems can be downloaded here. This is available from the CoreFonts SourceForge project.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Windows Vista Fonts

Font Libraries

JAVA_HOME Sickness

praj — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:03:44 +0000

While attempting to install Grails on Windows, I kept getting the following error when running grails:

C:\Users\praj> grails
ERROR: JAVA_HOME is set to an invalid directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\

Please set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the
location of your Java installation.

I had the JAVA_HOME variable set as a system environment variable (and it was pointing to an existing JDK installation). However, it turns out the problem was the trailing slash in my JAVA_HOME directory! Pretty obvious but anyway. So I changed it from:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\ to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17

Closed the current command prompt window and opened a new one, verified my JAVA_HOME:

C:\Users\praj> echo %JAVA_HOME%
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17

Note that when I quoted the path like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_17"

I kept getting the error Files were unexpected at this time so if you have the same problem, try dropping the quotes around the path.

Starting and Stopping Processes with a Batch Script

praj — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:48:33 +0000

This post explains how to write batch scripts in Microsoft Windows to start and stop a particular program. This can be really handy if you want to schedule a program to start and stop at particular times using the Task Scheduler.

The following batch script will start a program in a given directory in minimised window mode:

@echo off

echo.
echo Starting «ProgramName»
echo.

start /D"C:\Program Files\«ProgramDir»\" /MIN /B «ProgramExec.exe»

Replace «ProgramName» with a description of the program that you are starting. This is for informational purposes only.
Replace «ProgramDir» with the directory your program is installed.
Replace «ProgramExec.exe» with the executable program.

The following batch script will stop a particular program executable by killing the process (this is done forcefully).

@echo off

echo.
echo Stopping «ProgramName»
echo.

taskkill /F /IM «ProgramExec»

Replace «ProgramName» with a description of the program that you are starting. This is for informational purposes only.
Replace «ProgramExec» with the executable program that you want to stop.

The key to these two batch scripts is:

Using the start command to start the program. Type start /? in a command prompt to learn more.
Using the taskkill command to stop the program. Type taskkill /? in a command prompt to learn more.