I have a contract that I’m working on that requires I work with rails.  That, in itself, isn’t so bad.  But I think what bothers me most about rails can be summed up in one word: partials. For example, let’s say I have the following:
render :partial => ‘employee’, :collection => @employees
What this means is [...]

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I had a job interview today, and one of the “challenges” with which I was presented was this: “We own several sites. We would like our user to be able to log into the central site as a subscriber, and then all the other sites will know what permissions that user has.”
The sites are [...]

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Java is Pass-By-Value, Dammit!
Quite possibly the most important article I’ve ever read, because it finally, finally explains to me what Java’s object-passing model is really all about. I’ve never understood it, and now I do: it’s exactly backwards from pass-by-reference, so it’s exactly backwards from the languages with which I grew up. The [...]

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Like many designers, I’ve been enjoying Clients from Hell, a collection of various incidents freelance designers and developers have had working with customers over the years.  Oh, boy, do I know some of these.  But there’s one that stuck in my craw: “Slow It Down.”  The basic complaint is common to Ajax-based applications: if you’re [...]

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I’ve always been a little leery of studies that show that somehow, a bigger monitor equals more productivity.  Well, count me as no longer leery.  I’ve been hacking on a 24″ monitor I bought at a Christmas sale yesterday, and already I’m going along significantly faster than I was before.  For one thing, I can [...]

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