When you do this:

'Hey there!'.replace('e', 'a');

coming from most backgrounds, you’d expect this:

'Hay thara!'

but you end up with this:

'Hay there!'

Wha?? Talk about running into debug issues and pulling your hair out.

The issue is that the default behavior is to just replace the first instance of a string. Personally, I’m not quite sure why this is the case, but the fact remains that it is. Now, another option is to use regular expressions. Let’s try:

'Hey there!'.replace(/e/, 'a');

Still, no dice. You get:

'Hay there!'

Egads!

However, if you do:

'Hey there!'.replace(/e/gi, 'a');

You’re then using the global regular expression replacement, so you get:

'Hay thara!'

Finally, just what we were looking for! So, note that anytime you do 'original string to search within'.replace(/string to look for/gi, 'string to replace with'), then you’ll end up with what you expected – a global replace-all function throughout the string.

One thing in particular was the dismissive tone. It was never really considered from an engineering standpoint of an engineer. Certainly it sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea at first, but when someone does some research they find it’s not as far-fetched as they originally thought. The idea that is costs “kazillion zillions” is entirely fictitious. At least do some research and use real numbers.

The real pricetag is between $8 billion and $20 billion, or .2-.5% of the 2012 US federal expenditure, which you can compare to NASA’s 2012 budget of $19 billion.

Now, things can certainly go overbudget, it happens all the time, but even if it still costs ten times as much, the benefits outweigh the problems significantly.

In a nutshell, any writer should be far more educated on the topic and do some actual fact-checking before writing a terribly misinformed article.

And I fully understand if I sound like a space elevator fanboy, I love the idea and have read a lot of the literature on it, it’s something I get really excited abuot – I’m not quite sure how one wouldn’t.

First, here’s some benchmarks from September 27th from Lifehacker. There’s an article about a very promising IE10, then there was a follow-up two days later about the upcoming Opera build.

As for Windows 8, here’s a good video from June demoing some features and the updated UI (the Internet’s Wadsworth Constant applies, so feel free to skip to 30% in).

Granted, until you use it yourself, it’s hard to say what the truth is when updates are announced. Personally, I thought the iPad UI seemed silly because it was just a spread out iPod/iPhone UI with wasted space, but using it is still really nice. So, we’ll see how things change.

One aspect, which is likely the most important aspect of them all, is your team’s structure and the different roles that people take and how those roles fit into getting things done well. Even when the team is really just one person, that one person has to take on those different roles. Though there are many different names for these roles, I’ll give them the most generic classifications possible and then give examples of those kind of roles and their relationship to the features or requirements needed for a project or effort.

Source – Examples: Client, Business Analyst
This is the person who has the inspiration or idea for what should be created and at least some vision of what that will look like. This could be a client who needs a website made, a developer with an idea for the next killer app or a business requirement coming from management. I tend to think of them as “the Source” because they are where the work or project is coming from.

Refiner – Examples: Project Manager, Lead Developer, Designer
Here we have the person who really delves into what needs to happen to make something useful and compelling. They either can be the Source who refines their own idea, or they could have a back-and-forth with the source to really find out what is going to happen, what’s needed and what benefit the idea is going to provide.

Architect – Examples: Technical Lead, Lead Developer
After the Source and Refiner have done their jobs and come up with what should be built, the Architect decides how it’s going to be built and how it’s going to happen. That can include deciding the technology or methodology that will make the idea into an actual project and how it’s going to be completed.

Builder – Examples: technical Lead, Developer
The Builder will take what the Architect, Refiner and Source have put together and make it a reality. They will take the project and actually build or complete it, likely with a fair amount of interaction with the above three as unforeseen or unplanned events, complications or considerations come into play.

Tester – Examples: End User, Project Manager, Client, Developer
Once the Builder believes they have finished creating the project, or at least portions of it, someone checks to make sure it’s behaving and works as expected. This Tester will often go back and forth with the Builder when unintended problems are found or missing features are discovered or additional requirements that weren’t thought of before are found.

User – Examples: General Public, Employee, Client
Finally, once the project has been completed, there is the actual user of that project. This is the person who the project was built for and who should be the main consideration throughout the project, making their life easier or more enriching in one way or another.

Now that we have these different roles defined, I hope to go into what an ideal structure would be on a given project in a follow-up post.

That’s all old news and the debate is still raging about how to go about it and what tools to use and there are plenty of different, great arguments on both sides.

Then I thought about XBox, Playstation 3 and Wii.

Granted, I haven’t yet looked into the technical aspects of it, but being able to create a channel or app for each of those common consoles with a common codebase would be more than helpful for a variety of organizations. Whether you’re creating a small game that you want to run both on mobile and on those consoles without going through the process of distributing disks and working with publishers or you’re creating an application for an organization like the NFL, being able to roll out on all of those platforms relatively easily and at a lower cost to development would be an amazing asset.

This is just a thought experiment at this point, but it certainly makes me wonder about what could happen when you have that kind of cross platform development available.

I should note that one of the reasons I feel like I’ve been thinking about this is my new position as a Software Engineer at VEVO starts today.

I’m very excited to work in this fast-paced, exciting environment where the developers are solving problems that very few people in the world have to solve, let alone even consider. It’s music, it’s fun and it’s high-performance software where bandwidth is near the highest it can be and performance cannot be taken lightly. I’m looking forward to the new challenges, a change of pace and the new people I am going to work with and learn from.

I loved my time at Bootstrap Software – I learned a lot, had a lot of fun and made some great friends. It wasn’t an easy decision by any means and I will certainly miss them.

Here’s to looking forward to the next step in my career!

I don’t think he could be more wrong. Technology isn’t obsolete in 5 years – it’s obsolete in 1-2. It’s very fad-intensive, with quick iterations. People don’t drop out because they’re not trained in the new things coming out – it’s because they’ve burnt out trying to work while learning new things, couldn’t keep up with learning these new things or they plod along without learning new things and fall to the wayside. “Training” doesn’t happen – learning by getting thrown into the deep end does.

Also, I love how the first comment lauds Cappelli’s comment, yet is one of the things I couldn’t disagree with more in the article. The reason that there are young developers, and why companies want young, smart, driven developers is because they drive them into the ground in 5-10 years or the developers become so disillusioned by what they often feel is the stupidity or inefficiencies around them that they want to get out. Sometimes hearing, “it’s a business rule,” isn’t the most calming experience.

While personally, I do like learning new skills, techniques and adding to my knowledge base, what really excites me is being able to do something quickly, to accomplish something faster than I would have been able to before. That’s what a lot of the newer technologies that come out do for you – something that would take 10 hours now takes 1, etc. That’s why people will pay so much for developers at the cutting edge. If you can do things 10 times as efficiently, it’s a deal to pay you twice, three times or eight times as much as the guy sitting next to you.

This thinking reminds me of a recent video where Matt Damon discusses teachers, their compensation and the fiery issues that are currently surrounding that sector. The comment by that professor is coming from an MBA-type analysis which loses a lot of truths by measuring only concrete facts. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but people need to acknowledge that it loses a lot of the emotional and immeasurable part of the picture in the meantime.

Just by happenstance, on the same day I read an article by Thomas L. Freidman for the NY Times about the start-up of you. Now, by combining these two articles, can we get the actual state of careers in this country.

While I’d like to cater to my ego and say that developers are the rockstars while project managers are the band managers, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Of course, each team is different and has different dynamics, so there are no universal truths.

However, with regards to the above article, ultimately, project manager has to have an in-depth understanding of the business rules, business goals and requirements, as well as an accurate understanding of technical practices, methodologies and restrictions.

I say accurate because that’s really what’s important. He or she doesn’t need to know the details of how changing an application to a new framework is a lot of work, just that it is. And when they’re unsure, they ask questions to get that accuracy. It would be perfect for the project manager to have enough of a technical background to be able to have that in-depth technical understanding, but nothing is truly perfect in this world.

Creating content has become extremely easy on the modern web. Whether it’s through a platform like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, or through a self-hosted or created package. Either way, the creation of content is easy. And it needs to be. It’s one key to providing value with your site.

Any given site, in order to provide value, needs to either provide content or provide functionality. Often, the difference between these two can be blurred – while Gmail’s functionality is clearly impressive, it’s ultimately a method of providing content. The same goes for Facebook and other sites with a lot of functionality.

Thus, there is a lot of content flying around, from individual, small sites to massive, cutting-edge applications.

This is what the modern web has become – an egalitarian medium where anyone can add content quickly and easily. While the creation if good content itself can be hard and time consuming, the addition of that content is fast and easy.

This does create a lot of unnecessary and superfluous noise (check out some Twitter hahstags to see what I mean), ultimately, it’s a good thing as it gives everyone the chance to be heard. Not a guarantee, but a chance.

PS – I wrote this post in the same physical therapy session.