How To Leave A Job You Like For One You'll Love -

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life - Confucious

Do you like your current job but dream of something better? Or perhaps you go to work and are constantly thinking about your side project, or hobby. This could be a sign you are in desperate need of a career change.

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Greater Market Share does not always mean Better Product - Use of a particular operating system on any platform is largely a matter of personal choice. Sometimes, that choice is made by a business or corporation on behalf of their employees, and other times, individuals can make the choice themselves. I’m often seen tweeting or facebooking the virtues of Apples operating systems and products, often citing increased sales statistics or my own experiences in my message that Apples products give me a better experience than any of the alternatives. However, I often see mention that Android must be better because it has a higher market share. Or Windows is king because it has a higher market share. Higher market share does not always mean better product. A number of variables play part in determining market share. There are many cases where a product with lower market share, is simply the better product.

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Rails, testing, and peace of mind - I must admit, I probably didn’t test my code as thoroughly as I ought to have. Let me re-phrase that. I did test it. I just didn’t write complete test cases to ensure regressions weren’t introduced when new bits were added. As a result, maintenance always took longer than it should have, and bugs were introduced when changes were made. Even though I had read and studied the importance of testing very early in my software development career, it was only after continued frustration with things breaking that I got off my butt and actually started using testing practices like TDD, BDD and even writing tests for code that had already been written. I made it a goal to have the code as covered as possible.

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Know Your Customer - A few weeks ago, I finalised some new code for a new section of an existing website. I always code websites using web standards and always test on the latest versions of Chrome (v10), Safari(v5), Opera(v11), Firefox(v3.6) and Internet Explorer(v8). In the case of the latter two, I test both the current version and the upcoming version. So the site is also run through its paces on Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9. As for mobile, I test on iPhone and iPad too. As you can see, it’s a pretty comprehensive test. However we began getting customer feedback that they couldn’t log in to the new section of the site.

I looked through the logs and couldn’t even see that they’d made an attempt to login. Very weird. I went back to the tests and everything worked. Then some users were able to log in. But the majority couldn’t. We started to get some screenshots and feedback and discovered that it was a browser issue. Internet Explorer 7 to be exact. The jQuery login popup we had implemented didn’t render correctly on the old Microsoft browser. Hence it didn’t work, and no entry was made in the logs, as the customer wasn’t even able to submit the form.

I had a look at the analytics data for this group of users and found that 89% of them were using Internet Explorer 7. A browser not in my test suite but used by the vast majority of our users (of this part of the site). The fix was easy once we knew the problem. And all customers can now log in.

Suffice to say that Internet Explorer 7 is now part of our test suite. We don’t test that things “look” the same. We just test that the site “works”. Internet Explorer 7 has 5.7% of the worldwide market share, and Internet Explorer 6 has 3.8%.

But the main lesson learned, is that when developing for a closed group (like an intranet or a internet site that is locked to certain users), make sure you know the browser statistics data. Not only will it ensure that what you’re developing works, but it also provides the opportunity to give them a better experience through harnessing the power of that particular browser.

Websites are like fashion -

Facebook is like fashion. It never ends.

I was watching..or re-watching….The Social Network the other night and my ears pricked up as I listened to some dialogue between a young Mark Zuckerberg and his equally young financier, Eduardo. They were celebrating the fact that The Facebook was about to “go live” and Eduardo asked if the site is “finished”. Mark shot back, “It’s never going to be finished. Facebook is like fashion. It never ends.”

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