After a long break from blogging due to arrival and care of a couple of small children, I’m now hoping to get back in the habit again, so here goes.
Our company Concept First has currently been advertising and interviewing for a job position, and I wanted to feedback to the candidates that we didn’t invite in, what we were looking for, and suggestions on how to improve their CVs.
Having just returned from two holidays: Colorado with a motorbike (lovely people, stunning scenery) and Firenze with my lovely girlfriend (lovely people, stunning architecture and art) I decided to update my OS X partition to the new shiny leopard. Here are a couple of notes of how I got on, which is hopefully useful to anyone else doing the same.
Like a number of people in the Delphi Community ( Steve Trefethen, Dan Miser ), and the development community as a whole, I now do all my development on a MacBook Pro. I changed to an Apple machine six months ago, for a number of reasons:
As a professional developer, most of my clients run Windows, and most of my native development is done using Visual Studio 2005 or Delphi 2006, connecting to SQL Server or Oracle backends. I boot my laptop into Windows to do this work, or use Parallels to run it with Mac OSX (when I got my MacBook Pro I got it with 3G of RAM so Windows runs pretty fast inside OSX). Increasingly though I am doing web development, which means I can do much more work inside just OSX.
The more I have used OSX, the more I prefer it to Windows, so I have put together this list of tools and hints for doing professional development on OSX:
I am currently coming to the end of a large project for one of our clients, where I have been acting in the Business Analyst and Technical Lead roles. It has been a fun and successful project, and I wanted to pass along some of the lessons I’ve learnt (again) about how to make Technical Analysis (and the project as a whole) successful (and also make a checklist for next time around ;-).
It must be remembered that IT solutions (and really any business change) are all about two things: Incentives and Trade-offs.
Looking at the load this blog is causing, virtually all of it’s requests are for the syndication feeds so I decided to off-load the network bandwidth to Feed Burner ( recently acquired by Google).
Feedburner basically checks your site every 30 minutes (you can also manually request an update) and caches the response. Rather than ask my subscribers to change the feeds source, I decided to use Apache to redirect all requests to my feeds to feedburner, unless it was actually feedburner requesting the information.
To get this to work took a bit of Apache shenanigans, so I thought I would document it here both for myself and for anyone else who needs to do the same. It is also a useful example of how powerful Apache is, particularly as a forward facing server than manages the virtual URL space and links it up to various webs server technologies and platforms behind the scenes (loose URL => implementation coupling). The blog is running on Ruby on Rails, Typo engine, running on port 4000 internally. Our firewall blocks outside access to this port, so we use Apache to proxy it for us (it rewrites any URL’s on the way out to be the correct external address). We also use it as an SSL gateway, so we setup all the certificates in just one place.