Developers Anonymous

I am typing this blog post in notepad while I wait for the page to load. I have been contracted out to another company and I am doing sql reporting there. most local sites such as saDev are lightning fast then 99% of international sites and some local are deathly slow. Been waiting 25 minutes for the Write Blog page to finish loading.

Anyways, there are other developers and I find their style of web development very interesting. Their whole app works around xml and since I haven't done much of it I find it really interesting and just by listening to them debate and decide on things you learn quite a bit.

<a href="http://urlrewriter.net">http://urlrewriter.net</a> is one of the most interesting things I've discovered thanks to these guys and I'm going to be messing around with it soon to find out whats possible and whats not.

As soon as I have some free time I'll be checking this out. Also hopefully getting Crackdown for my 360 later. Should be interesting......

I received the greatest email of my life today. We had a new guy start at our company yesterday. He seems a nice guy but he's a raver. In general I don't get along with many ravers due to their mainstream approach to life. I know that generalising but thats what I've experienced. Bascially everyone in our office are Rock/Metal/Heavy Metal fans and I was talking to one of my colleague's who has been contracted out to a client and this is the replied I received after informing him of out new "raver". I just find this funny and no offense is intended for anyone who enjoys house/trance/rave/techno/hard house and whichever other genre of "raver" music exists.

"Steven, I want you to listen to me closely. It is our duty not only to society but to the musical industry as a whole to weed out all the heretics and fools who follow the path of the "raver" <Spit>.

Unfortunately, as you said, he is past the point of hard return. I say "hard" and not "no" because I believe that every one of them needs to be saved no matter how long it takes. I am however almost sure that we will not be able to convert him to the musical truth that we call Metal.

For now the most important undertaking is to show him the error of his ways in following the path of the "raver". Any suggestions?"

A discussion we're having on the saDev website is getting exceptionally interesting! Myself and another guy both worked at the same company at different times. We both worked with the same man where I had very good experiences he had a terrible time. It's interesting though because I've always based my opinion on a company by what the workers have said and today I see my little method doesn't work.

So how, pray tell, do you sum up a company before accepting an offer? There was two years difference between our respective tenures and yet such different results! I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but how do you get to check out the company before signing on?

Above is a HTTP Debugging Proxy that I have been introduced to. It is a very nice small little application that captures all the traffic between your pc and the web server of the site you are currently accessing. It shows the size of request, type of request and any HTTP codes if application. You can also view any sessions and a multitude of data. This is a great way to check exactly what gets sent to the user's PC when they access the site.

Fiddler Site: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler

Fiddler Download: http://www.fiddlertool.com/dl/FiddlerSetup.exe

Article: http://www.developer.com/lang/jscript/article.php/3631066

Overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/IE_IntroFiddler.asp?frame=true

Fiddler Blog: http://insidehttp.blogspot.com/

Last week Thursday evening we had our first SaDev meeting at the MS building and we watched a Channel 9 interview with Scott Hanselman and Jeffrey Snover. I must say, power shell looks awesome. The video was interesting but the great part of the evening came we when Craig and Andre started showing off Power shell and we started discussing its uses.

To all the people that didn't come, you seriously missed out. Tech Reel is going to become a regular thing where watch a video and discuss it afterwards and during and whatever else we feel like. If you have any ideas of videos or topics then just contact Andre or Craig and let them know!

Andre's Blog: http://www.mailowl.co.za/

Craig's Blog: http://dotnet.org.za/craign/

PS: Thanks for the free food and drink! Hope that tradition also continues ;)