From Wikipedia:

Every business requires teamwork. It doesn’t matter what field you are in. Music, medical, law, military, web development, even marriage. Nothing is successful without the mutual backing of each other toward the end goal. Support comes from respect, not the requirement thereof based on a job title. Command it, don’t demand it. It starts with you!

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I’ve blown through ~20 books in the last 2 months, many years ago I was a voracious reader and now it’s hit me again. I’ve wrote a little bit about what I have been reading over at my site.

www.kevinquillen.com

I am waiting on a few more books to come in. I now have roughly 3 on order every 2 weeks. I should be getting in ‘No Country for Old Men’, and ‘Slash’ this week.

What does that mean?
 When I build applications, I like to strictly maintain to all of the perceived standards that I think of or any that might occur to me as I’m building and the variants that I believe are allowable from this consistency.

How about some examples?
 Perfect consistency in my folders, components, functions, methods, files, tables, columns, you name it, I’ve got a good reason why I name it or space it or look at it a certain way.  

Have you ever looked through a piece of code someone else wrote and changed it to adhere to my precious standards?
  You bet. 

Have you ever argued relentlessly about such important concepts as how a database table is properly named?  
 Yes.  

Do you ever hold back from imparting your wisdom to your fellow employees by showing them the importance of a file being correctly indented or of a more sane folder structure or a "better way" then they explained?
Daily. More than that if I’m being honest.

Could you go on and on about different aspects of programming that you’ve deem immovable?
No need to answer that one.

What purpose do these standards have other than the noted annoyances caused to others?
I like to think that by strictly maintaining all of these standards, it allows me to use my thought on more important innovation instead of wondering how something is going to be named, or spaced, or whatever. 

Where does the practical part come from?
The practical part comes from being, well, practical enough to relent from these relentless standards.  For example, I like to name all database table names singularly (item instead of items).  What happens when I think a table should be called "group".  I have two options.  One, when calling the table via SQL, put the table in brackets, so that the reserved word is not taken as such.  The other is to break the rule and name this one plural.  I choose to name the table plural as I’d rather see an "s" at the end of group, then go through all the SQL code and put brackets around it.  Do the brackets even work in all cases?  Well, not real sure. Hence, me taking the easy way out and putting an "s" at the of group. 

Has anyone ever thought that much about singular or plural table names?
I hope so.

What is the purpose of this rant?
Well, I intended on describing all of the standards as I see them, but then two things happened.  One, I fell in love with the Q&A writing style.  Two, I don’t think (in most cases) it matters what specific standards you hold.  Just that you have standards. You have enough attention to detail to care about something as minute as the naming convention of a file (lower-case first word, upper case first letter of all other words,  acronyms should be all CAPS, abbreviations only if you can pick somebody off the street and they’d understand what you mean).  You’ve had enough thought about them to be able to stick up for these.  But also be practical enough to realize that the other side is better and switch quickly.  And, if that you aren’t hurting your productivity too much by sticking to these standards.  If you are, then make an exception.  Although, you must have a very good reason to stray.  In most cases, even if it seems like sticking to standards takes longer, it doesn’t because you need to think less when you look back it at. 

As the internet and technology zips along every hour of every day, literally hundreds of new threats arise in the form of spyware, malware, adware, worms, virii, you name it. For you, the user, it is imperative that you be proactive in protection of your machine, instead of reactive (waiting until something happens to take action). The more proactive you are in applying security, the more you can stop spreading junk that comes through your inbox or browser, and more importantly, protect your identity.

There are lots of retail software suites that can accomplish the basic protection you need for your computer. But lets take a look at some free offerings that you can find on the internet that can do just as good of a job and be used in conjunction with Norton type packages, adding an additional 60-80% more protection.

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For the past 2 years, I have been using various blog platforms on the internet (such as LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, and a slew of others that didn’t quite make it) and in client project developments for Inclind. I even use one for my own personal site/playground, built with Wordpress.

But recently, I took a step back and said, why Wordpress? Is it really that great?

Lets look at the reasons why I chose to integrate Wordpress into websites as a way of content management / blogging:

1. Simple to use.

2. Not hard to learn.

3. Allows non-internet types to jump in and start writing without having to program anything.

When I thought about it, are these really perks at all? Especially since I am an application developer? In retrospect, I feel like a lazy developer for bringing Wordpress into play for client projects, despite the fact I hooked it in well and made it work for them. But, you know what they say about hindsight.

That was then, this is now.

Thankfully, I am a better developer now than I was back then, and decided to code my own blogging solution that would be open ended enough for our needs that it could be deployed quickly into existing sites as well as ones under development. Since our web applications are powered by Coldfusion, and Wordpress is entirely in PHP, it creates a headache when trying to use Wordpress on a non PHP site. The reason being, you can’t run Coldfusion code in a php file, and vice versa, so it creates more overhead when integrating it into our Coldfusion applications and adds difficulty in extending site functions and maintaining all the code.

I thought, hell, why not just recreate Wordpress, take out what you don’t really need, and keep it streamlined? After doing some planning and whiteboarding, it occurred to me that creating a solution would be rather simple, and in just 5 days, I had built a blogging platform that is good enough for most people to use. I concluded that blog only needs a few core things: the content, the attributes (date, author, views), and ability to comment. This is all the user needs to conduct a blog. Other things like search engine optimization can be handled by the developer. The user does not need this headache, especially those that are not internet-savvy. What I mean is that our system will generate the appropriate data to gain search engine rank, aggregate feeds so people may add that blog content to their site, block spambots and other such features that the average user shouldn’t have to concern themselves with.

Wordpress does allow for theme switching though. But, that is just a feature for people without a website, and the templates available for it are rather bland. Thankfully, we have the two best graphic designers in all of Delmarva, Jason Steagall and Tom Brown, that can cook up beautiful websites in their sleep. This allows us to give customers exactly what they want without problems. Other companies tend to get templates from sweatshops like templatemonster.com, charge a ton of money, and force poor coding into these designs. Not Inclind. We build a custom solution each and every time, and thus is the basis of me dropping Wordpress as an offering.

Remarkably, I was able to get this done in just a week and ready to use. We have a lot of upcoming sites that are already using this feature, and I am quite proud of what I was able to achieve in just a short time. From a user perspective, I can tell you that around 80% of blogging platform features are simply not necessary. In other words, blog administration intranets are more complicated than they really need to be. By taking all of this away and leaving in what you do need, you will get more out of your blog and website that you can imagine, and have fun doing it. All you have to do is post, our system handles the rest. It will update itself to search engines, manage comments, block spammers, and everything else that makes blogging worthwhile all on its own. It is also 100% customizable from our perspective, should a user want to customize our platform even more, which I/we are happy to do.

Don’t believe me? Simply go to google.com and type in my name, Kevin Quillen. I come up in nearly 75% of the results on the first 5 pages. Now just imagine what we can do for your site with the blogging platform I just built, or our other web applications that include this function. After just a few months of tinkering, my site shot to the top of the list. Your site can be at the top too.

We offer free consultations for any project you have in mind. Call Inclind, Inc at (302) 856-2802 today and ask how we can help YOU.

So you want to learn how to play guitar huh, but not sure where to begin?

Most people will tell you that you should learn to play acoustic first, which is a fairly big misconception to bestow upon those interested in learning guitar. Learning guitar should be a fun process, and never feel like work or a job.

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