Andy Milk Interactive

I recently made the acquaintance of a designer through a project we were both working on.  After checking out her work, I saw that her style might match up very well with a couple projects that I had coming up that needed design help.  I proposed her work to my clients, who obliged, and then proposed the work to her.  In her email response, not only did she response in the affirmative for helping on the projects, but she offered me a small programming project that she needed help on.

I didn’t intend to get any work out of our interaction, but I learned a valuable lesson through it.  Offer some work to people and they might just offer it back! Sure, it’s usually luck or good timing that creates a situation like this, but it’s also good business, a little tit-for-tat, and the kind of offer that strengthens relationships with your colleagues, clients, and subcontractors.

In client services, it’s often beneficial just to get something DONE, and worry about the details later.  I’ve worked with many developers in the past who have hemmed and hawed over the details, documented everything from top to bottom, and delayed in getting something done.

While I do think you should approach any task, fix, upgrade, update, or feature request with a slow, steady, and calcuated pace, you shouldn’t run into analysis paralysis or what I’m just coining now as CompSci Incompetence.  No offense to programmers with multiple degrees from prestigious universities, or engineering consulting backgrounds, but often times the Scientific Method approach to programming can really piss of clients.  That’s mostly because of the time it takes to gather requirements, analyze the system, design a solution, code, test, deploy, review, etc.

Most of my clients need things done immediately when they send a request.  Aside from monetary transactional, senstive security-related, or iron clad brand requirements, I often times will take the most direct and fast path to completion.  If some small details fall through the cracks, they can be fixed soon after deployment, and the errors will likely only be seen by 1% of the viewing audience (or my client), while 99% saw SOMETHING rather than waited for it to be perfect.

Again, quality is very important and this shouldn’t be an excuse to be sloppy, hasty, or to ignore details.  But it ALWAYS makes clients happy to say, “DONE!” and the caveat that there a few things to tweak post-launch or post-deployment.  Sometimes you even get lucky and there’s nothing else to do post-launch.

Too many documents, too many emails, and too much analysis can be like molasses in a Nor’easter.  (it’s snowing in Boston as I write)

This is a very small subtle technique that has become second nature to me.  If you’re working on a web application, or just fixing some typos for a friend on a web site, ALWAYS include the full link in your email when you’re showing the changes or submitting for approval.

It’s a tiny time-saver that your clients, friends, and colleagues will appreciate in the long run.  I’ve even had a couple clients mention that they appreciate that small extra effort.

Instead of writing something like:

“OK, those changes should be all set.”

or

“If you look at ‘integrated-marketing.html’, you should see the changes.”

Take the few extra seconds to write:

“You should see the most recent changes here:  http://www.andymilk.com/integrated-marketing“

It allows the recipient to scan the email quickly, see there’s a link, and click on it to review without any extra effort.  If your client is like most people in the web development world, he or she is working on 20 things at once, so it’s not always assumed that your recipient will be one click away from the page you’re working on.

Just a litte client services tip that adds up.

“What goes up, must come down”.  - Proverb

Wait, that’s a little boring.  How about:

“It’s a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they’d just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.” - Stephen Wright

Another service that hosting providers offer is some sort of uptime monitoring.  I’ve found they vary from host to host and often times they only monitor if the web server and/or database is still up and running.  If you have some weird error that crops up in your application from, for instance, a long-running never-ending process, or unexpected user data input that breaks the site, or a malicious attack, your host’s uptime monitor likely won’t catch this problem.

I use a very cheap (free if you only track a few sites) uptime monitor from SiteUptime.com to track my clients’ sites.  If one of them goes down and returns ANY code other than HTTP 200 (OK), the monitor emails me.  Since I’m unhealthily attached to my iPhone, I’m checking email constantly and I’ll know within 5-10 minutes of the site going down that there’s a problem.  If it’s a mission critical application, you can elect to have text messages sent in the event of an outage.

This is an easy one to stay on top of the integrity of your sites and projects.

Most hosting providers backup their servers on a daily basis with an off-site backup once a week.  If something catastrophic happens to your server, code, or data, you can rewind to the time of the backup.  The problem is that the process for getting the disc or database image back up and running can sometimes take hours or even days.

I learned recently on a project that you should always add your own programmatic way of backing up and restoring a database.

On one specific Rails project, it was as easy as writing an 11 line rake task that performed a quick backup of the mySQL database.  A cron job runs this task once a day.  If you have enough disk space, feel free to run the backup more often.  Twice a day, every hour, etc.  You could also write another periodic task that clears out old versions of the backups, in case disk space is at a premium.

Restoring the database is as easy as running one command.   I use GZip to extract the data straight into mySQL.

Often times in the rush to finish a project, only the essential functionality and user testing is attended to.  Don’t forget about your data loss and recovery plan.  Take a few extra hours to build one.

It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally made the switch to Mac.  For now, I have a white MacBook and I am ecstatic with the results so far.

I was nervous to make the switch with several projects going at once.  I was worried that my productivity would slow and I’d have to spend extra hours installing tons of software, configuring the Mac, and moving all my files and settings over.  There were a few hiccups, but otherwise it’s been a very smooth experience.  The increase in my productivity has definitely made up for the hiccups and I’m now more productive than if I had stuck with the PC.

The funny thing about this is the reason I made the switch.  My wireless router went on the fritz and my internet connection became very spotty.  The Mac seemed to be handling it fine and zipping through sites and files.  I banged around on my PC for a while and then jumped out of the plane.  I wasn’t 100% sure that there was something wrong with the PC but I figured now was as good of a time as any to switch.  After using the Mac for a little while, the same internet issues cropped up.  I checked out my modem and router and heard a high pitched noise coming from the $50 router.  Pressed for time, I hit up my local Radio Shack for a new router.  Installed it and had it up and running in a few minutes, with both the Mac and PC screaming along.  Looks like it was the router!  Well, thank you router for crapping out so I could make the switch.

It took me a couple days to get used to Command-[insert shortcut here] rather than CTRL-[command].  I absolutely LOVE Spotlight, getting me to programs, FTP sites, SSH, and documents as fast as I can type them.  (It’s kind of ironic how much I’m “typing” on this Mac given the fact that the company differentiated itself early on with a snazzy GUI rather than a DOS prompt.  AND it’s ironic that I make fun of, nearly to the point of anger, movies and TV shows that show the “computer nerd” typing a bunch of stuff, without any visual feedback while he/she is typing, and then hitting a loud Enter key and having the screen change drastically.  What, no one makes typos in the movies?)

ANYWAY, I’m very happy so far.  All my projects in SVN were quickly checked out and setup, many of them Linux-based, which is tucked neatly under the stunning Leopard GUI.  It’s so much more efficient than the faked-out Linux I had running on my PC.  Ruby and mySQL are 10 times faster, and this machine’s specs aren’t as powerful as my PC.  Go figure.

My PC is sitting on a shelf now.  I got VMWare up and running with a solid copy of Windows XP, with any Windows software I need to reach back to.  One of which is Send Personally, which I use for emailing a big group of people (who know me well).

Another small detail I love:  I open up the Mac and I’m ready to work/play in 3 seconds.  My PC required at least 30-60 seconds to start back up from hibernation and if I had to restart?  Forget about it.  I usually would go make coffee, take out the recycling, or pick up the guitar.

So if you’re a developer thinking about taking the plunge, go for it.  Microsoft Office was not enough to keep me around.  I’ve got it on VMWare anyway and try to use Google Docs as often as I can.

If you talk to any web developer who builds anything on the front end (HTML, CSS, DHTML, Javascript, AJAX, etc.) about Internet Explorer 6, you’re bound to hear some harsh words. This browser was launched in August 2001, back when every DOTCOM cube had a Foosball table, everyone’s stock options were worth a small island, and I’m pretty sure the AJAX acronym wasn’t even created yet.  I think Netscape was also the leading browser too.

IE6 takes up about 25% of the CSS and AJAX time I put into sites these days, if they’re being supported, because of it’s shoddy adherence to HTML and CSS standards, and it’s inability to handle specific Javascript tasks. Some purists claim that as long as the HTML and CSS is structured correctly, there shouldn’t be any discrepancies, but I beg to differ.  Many advanced CSS layouts require customization for IE6.  Luckly, there’s a very easy way to include IE6- and IE7-style sheets, but sometimes that doesn’t even cut it.  I’ve even had to use server-side browser detection to insert inline styles to handle some issues.

In my opinion, new web applications should follow Facebook’s lead and strongly suggest users upgrade and warn that many of the slick features within their site won’t function correctly.  I recently tried to send a message to someone on Facebook using IE6 without any luck.  Good move Facebook!  Leave those users and companies behind!  (with a friendly nudge to upgrade)

At the time of this post, W3Schools is reporting that 24.5% of global internet users are STILL using IE6.  It’s steadily declining almost a point per month, which will bring it around 20% at the start of 2009, but that’s not fast enough.

I’m passively starting a campaign with this post to encourage people to upgrade to the newest version of IE or another browser altogether.

If you run Internet Explorer 6 on your PC and you have no restrictions on making changes to your software, please take these steps:

1.  Email me and apologize. 
2.  Upgrade to the latest Internet Explorer, or better yet, try Firefox (who urge users in their own browser to upgrade) or Google Chrome.

If your company or school has set Internet Explorer 6 as a standard, take these steps:

1.  Email your boss or administrator and politely ask them to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer so you can take the advantage of modern web technologies and be MORE PRODUCTIVE as an employee or student.

2.  Install Firefox or Google Chrome and use that until they upgrade.

Hmmm, maybe I’ll put together a little widget that people can embed on their MySpaces and Facebooks to urge users to upgrade.

Feel free to post your ideas on how to spread this message.  Or if you just want to complain about IE6, be my guest.

Cheers,

Andy

OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic and childish sounding, but here it is! I always thought that everything that could be said in blogs was either already said, said in a different way, or just plain boring. But then I realized that I have a lot to talk about as far as my work, my approach to interactive software engineering, the tools I use, the sites I play with, etc. So feel free to dig into my business pitch stuff and when that gets boring, I’ll try to post a bunch on a weekly basis.

Cheers!