CodeBork

I've recently been working on a new version of my personal website, which can be found over at http://www.alastairsmith.me.uk/. I wanted a light-weight site that would pull in data from my various presences across the web including my two blogs, GitHub, and Google Picasa; furthermore, as much as possible should be hosted on some form of Content-Distribution Network (CDN). Google's CDN is serving up jQuery and jQuery UI quite nicely for me whilst minimising the amount of stuff I need to administer and maintain myself.

It's generally a good idea when developing web applications to keep your in-development version separate from your production version; indeed this goes for many development scenarios, including in-house application testing before rolling out to users, desktop software development, and others. The backbone of such a strategy is a good source control system, and whilst centralised source control like Subversion can handle this capably, a certain amount of friction is involved in setting it up. Distributed version control systems, and Git in particular, can remove this friction.

Because my personal website is so small by design, the friction of setting up a centralised source control system for deployment scenarios for such a tiny application would have been great enough to put me off looking into it any further. Luckily, I switched to Git as my version control tool of choice about a year ago, and haven't really looked back. Here's how I accomplished a simple web deployment mechanism that can work for sites with a back-end component as well as a smart front-end.

Last time, I rounded off the series-within-a-series on class design and usage, Working Classes. The next topic for dissection is routine design, creation and usage, and this topic will be handled over two posts. This post will form a bit of an introduction and cover design considerations for high-quality routines through the classification of different kinds of routine cohesion. So, without further ado, let's get cracking!

There are a number of design and implementation issues to consider when working with classes, not least dealing with inheritance. This third post in the series of four on "Working Classes" covers my take on Steve McConnell's thoughts on containment, inheritance, member functions and data, and constructors.

If you've been following the developer hangouts in the last few months, you've probably heard at least a little bit about NoSQL and document databases. You may also have read how they're the best thing since sliced bread, and that NoSQL will be your new BFF. Contrariwise, you may have read some of the FUD surrounding the subject and have *cough* a less rose-tinted view of the things.

Last night, I attended the Cambridge NxtGenUG meeting on this very topic, and I intend to distil some of what I learnt in this post; mostly it'll be me riffing around the stuff that Neil covered. The talk was delivered by Neil Robbins, whose delivery was always energetic, interesting and informative. The 100mph demo at the end of the talk was both simple and powerful. He's a great speaker even if his slides were a bit wordy (with one or two being excessively so). Check him out on Twitter.