coupling de-coupled CMS

I’m hip deep in the design of a new CMS to power some large scale sites. The big buzzword going on at this level is around how the CMS products are designed to be ‘de-coupled’. Specifically we are talking about decoupling the deliver of the site from the management of the content. This is very understandable, as your backend needs can be very different then the portal. The backend CMS has rigid security and workflow concerns and the front-end is optimized to serve pages fast....

April 27, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Netbeans for HTML-CSS work?

Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code. Not only php code, but wordpress php code. That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches) I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality. Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:...

December 10, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

javaFX sneaks out the door

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/ Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter. Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design....

December 5, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

A House With No Front Door Keeps you off the streets

I found an interesting article today. A House With No Front Door It is written by a product marketing professional lamenting about dealing with ‘resource constrained’ engineering teams. Seeing as how I come from a resource constrained engineering team I thought it was an interesting read. The premise of the article was the disconnect as described: Perhaps it is my job to get this perspective across to them, and I try to do that, but the gulf between the “feature triage” perspective that many engineers have, and the “holistic” customer or market perspective that is needed is enormous....

November 25, 2008 · 3 min · Aaron Held

Chef Ramsay as a model manager?

I was watching Kitchen Nightmares where Chef Gordon Ramsay verbally attacks restaurant owners in order to point out the areas where they lack. I used to think he was just another character on TV but there was a turning point in that episode. The owner was berating everyone around him and causing so much stress that his customers noticed and his business was failing. People from the Chef to the Hostess noticed the problems but they didn’t try to fix the core issue....

November 15, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held