GTACM is sponsoring a few series of things called Tech Topics that aim to teach things that aren’t offered at Georgia Tech. They are free of charge and available to everyone. One topic is “Zero Pageloads – The Web With AJAX” taught by me.

What you need to know:

Zero Pageloads – The Web With AJAX. Fridays 4:00pm. Bunger-Henry 311

You can register for it by going to the gtacm blog: http://gtacm.org

signup is here: http://gtacm.com/blog/about/special-interest-groups/techtopics/tt-2102/

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Currently I am employed by one company, work pro bono for another, and work with-the-intention-of-getting-paid-in-the-future for a third (along with being a full time student). These three ventures are all very similar in that they are all web development work. For developing in these languages, I have an awesome set of comfortable tools that I use.

Hardware

I am actually quite proud of my setup: AMD 9950 2.6GHz Quad-core, 4 Gigs RAM, a 22″ Acer, and 23″ Dell Monitors. I just recently added a second monitor, and I now can’t develop without it. Whether I’m coding on one and testing in another, or watching a movie on one and working on another, it’s just damn useful to have 3600×1080 resolution to play with. Also have an awesome keyboard that I cannot live without. I got spoiled on my old Macbook Pro with a backlit keyboard, and I do so much work at night (as evidenced by the fact that it is now 2:30am) that it’s kind of neccessary. I also got so used to typing on a low-profile keyboard, that I now struggle to type at all on a regular one.

Linux FTW

I am a little unconventional when it comes to web use in that I use Linux Mint for my main desktop machine. However, this is awesome because it comes with a LAMP stack already built in. Just plop whatever code I want to run into /var/www and i’m good to go! Currently (15 Feb 2010) I am running Apache 2.2.12, PHP 5.2.10-2ubuntu6.4, and MySQL 5.1.37.

Editing

Let me make something very clear. I dislike command-line text editors. That said, I know my way around vim, and nano enough to use them on my remote servers, but on my desktop, I prefer to use graphical editors for ease of use, as I have multiple files open at once (yes, i know about screen)

When I was on Mac, I used and loved TextMates. However, since that does not exist on linux I was forced to move on *tear*. I have briefly tried Bluefish but found it tailoring more to plain HTML writing than a general purpose text editor.

I have settled on Geany. It has projects, an incredibly powerful version of ctags, a very strong search/replace function, a nifty color chooser, and an svn plugin. I also have some custom key-maps set, like ctrl+s to save all open tabs instead of only the current tab in use. Also, for php (and some other languages) it has function recognition (similar to eclipse) and completion. I rely on this function all the time when I can’t remember exactly the name of a function.

Testing

On my local machine, I use Google Chrome Beta as my main browser. I used to used the Dev builds, but as of the 5.0.322.2-r38810 build, the DOM Inspector is non-functional. This affords me the awesome power of the Chrome DOM Inspector (though not as good as Firebug in Firefox) which allows me to debug javascript, as well as test layouts/styles immediately without changing the actual css file.

As a responsible web developer, it is necessary that I test in several different browsers to make sure that my stuff works. I have Sun’s VirtualBox with Windows 7 installed on it and a slue of browsers installed to test as thoroughly as I can.

Thoughts? Complaints? Suggestions? What is your favorite setup?

I have been working for a small startup since about April, and up until last week I was the only active developer. Recently we got some funding and hired 9 other developers that they have now placed me in charge of. This is a bit overwhelming at first. Do we have enough work for 10 people? How often do they need to check in? How much work should I assign them at a time?

These are not fun questions to answer. Because we are just starting getting everyone accustomed to our code base (which needs to be rewritten from scratch) I spend most of my time hunting through our legacy code to answer their questions about where things are. I also spend alot of time getting them up and running with their initial projects.

Point of story, I’m not doing as much actual developing as I would like to right now, but I hope this will change soon.

There will most likely be updates on here as to how this is progressing.