You can use a credit card anywhere in life…

Dave Ramsey tells people that their debt problems are 80% behavior. Behavior can carry over into anything you do…everything you do. As a developer, you go into debt every time you think you’ll come back later to create a class to handle the code you just copied and pasted for the 5th time. When is the last time you accomplished your coding goals, and moved on without creating the documentation to support it? (No, developers, that’s not a trick question.)

A company I worked for was a PHP/MySQL shop, and I had a simple screening I used when searching for a web developer to develop secure applications. It was a simple request: Write the code to submit an email address through a form, handle inserting that into a database, then pull it out to display to me. They had all the time and resources they needed, and could just email me a zip file of the finished product. Most failed…no matter how much experience they had. It only required a few lines of code, and should take an experienced developer a few minutes.

Don’t owe your code — own it…

Some said they didn’t have time. Some seem offended that I would ask. Some submitted code. Two stood out. The one that got the job not only wrote the code, but he wrote it securely, and placed the appropriate code for handling the transaction into a class so that it could be reused and maintained. It even created the database and tables if they did not exist. It was far more than I expected, and once he was hired, he continued his good habits and owned his code.

What about the other one that stood out? He sent me code that did the minimum requested, and told me that he wouldn’t use the code he wrote on any server because it needed to be secured, and the input would need to be filtered…In other words, he hadn’t even gotten the job and he was building debt. He owed his code something, which means everyone on the team would be a slave to his code. One day the debt collector would cash in by exposing protected information worth millions. That stuck with me because he knew there was a problem, and even told me what it was, but he didn’t fix it.

Don’t OWE your code — OWN it…

Is there an echo? Did I just repeat that? Yes, I did. The next time you intend on cutting a corner in your code, just to meet a deadline, or for some other justification, repeat this to yourself.

Take the time to make the right choices.  Pick the technology and methodology that fits the need of the business.  It’s not the hottest, or even the easiest path. Part of your job as an expert in your field is to know when and how to use the right tool. I know a great pair of pliers can remove bolts, but a wrench is better because it doesn’t tear up the bolt over time. Yeah, I know rust can sometimes lock up a nut, but you might choose a trick like WD-40 and a little patience before brute force and a sledgehammer.

Go fix your code.  If you’ve created tons of debt in your code, try a snowball approach.  Identify problems, order the tasks from smallest to largest, and start attacking them. If you want to know why, then go read some of the links to Dave Ramsey’s writings. It’s a behavioral concept — it makes the mountain climbable. Once you get to the larger problems, you may need to divert some attention (and people) from new projects to shore up your code so that you are building on a solid foundation. For the larger problems, you may determine that you need to employ better technology.

Your code is an investment.  Time and money are invested into the software you develop. Many systems I constructed were only expected to last a few years until something better came along. A number of those systems have been running for a decade or longer, and are still in use today. I won’t say I’m perfect, and that I didn’t make mistakes along the way, but I’ve always tried to build applications that will be able to run for a long period of time without maintenance or attention.  Think this way as you build your applications.

Keep learning!  I still look back at those systems and I can think of things I could do to improve them and add another decade. I did the best I could with the available technology, given the budget and time allotted, but a year or two later I have new techniques and ideas. Be looking for those opportunities, learn new technology and techniques.  Be able to identify when it is the appropriate time to use these new skills, but most of all never stop learning!

Ever heard of Dave Ramsey? He has a pretty simple approach to money and credit…if you don’t have the cash, you don’t buy it. Debt is a hornets nest, and every time you pull out a credit card, you are throwing a rock into that nest — oh, and you are two feet away from the nest in a bright orange shirt. That means we’re stupid when we embrace debt, and we’ll pay for it. He has a process to step away from the nest in confidence…and it’s called baby steps.

A Proven Process…

The first one is building a small emergency fund — because something can and will happen. If you have this fund, it will keep you from adding more debt by putting that little emergency on a credit card — you know, because you’ll pay it off later…10 years later. Once you have this fund, you start attacking debt — smallest to largest amount. You don’t worry about interest rates, and if you try to make sense of it mathematically, it will likely not add add up. It’s your behavior that is the problem, and his goal is to get you to actually win by paying off everything, and not by being smart with the calculator. If you are in debt, you’ve already had a problem with adding and subtracting. It’s kind of like worrying how large each hornet in the nest is, because the sting of the smaller one’s will not hurt as bad. Right??? Really???? They all hurt!!!! RUN!!!

Not Money…Hope!

The Lampo Group not just a business. It is a head on, in your face mission to bring hope those living with debt, and literally save lives (or as Dave puts it, “change the family tree”). I recently read Dave’s new book called “Entreleadership.” I was just interested in picking up a few new leadership concepts, but never realized it was the ultimate play-by-play explanation of his business — from what happens when you show up late, or when you share the latest gossip, or going the extra mile to support a team member in need. He also covers a unique style of leadership, progress reporting, and advancement — based on the principle of The Golden Rule. At times it brought tears to my eyes because finally someone got it — how to run a business with principle and integrity.

A Team with Purpose…

Dave Ramsey’s Internet Development Team just started a new blog called “Develop With Purpose,” and they are trying to double the size of their web development staff. I recently had coffee with one of their Senior Architects, and I asked him if working for Dave Ramsey was everything the Entreleadership book says it is. Anyone could say “yes,” but he had stories to tell, and his face lit up as he told them.  This isn’t a game to them.  It is as serious as the days I would kneel down beside a nearly lifeless body, and do my best to save this person’s life.  To give that person a fighting chance to live.

If you are a web developer looking for a wonderful opportunity to, you should start looking at their site. You may save some lives by applying your talent in this organization, and they need team members willing to serve a cause much bigger than anything you could ever imagine.  They need servant leaders. (Something I learned about during my National Weather Service tenure)

Something More…

That’s not why I started writing this article, but I had to provide the setup. I had a few revelations today. In the next part, I’ll explain what they were, and how all of this fits in with those revelations.

Over the weekend I decided to take a look at ColdFusion (CF), and it’s potential in my web development toolkit.  I had to phrase that appropriately, for anyone that works with ColdFusion, using the phrase “potential in web development” is probably offensive.  ColdFusion has been around in one form or another since 1995.  I’ve seen the term CF for many of those years, and never really gave it a second thought.  I saw the name more once Macromedia bought it (since Dreamweaver and Fireworks were my two favorite web tools).  It is now owned by Adobe, which doesn’t always give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it is still an important product.  The fact is, ColdFusion has been around a long time, and has a history of success in the field of web development.  It also seems to have been continually modernized and tuned to the industry standards and technology.

The “foundation” of ColdFusion is the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML).  From what I’ve worked with so far, it looks and feels like writing HTML.  So I decided to see what I needed to do to experiment with it.

Finding Railo

Of course, Adobe’s ColdFusion server product is pretty expensive for experiments and casual development. It makes more sense for businesses. In searching for my options, I found out that there were a number of open source projects, and Railo caught my eyes. As I researched, it looked very easy to set up and get running. It is supposed to be highly compatible with the CFML framework, and perform very well. Great! Let’s go!

I initially set Railo up using Jetty…and it was easier that I thought. I won’t describe it here, because immediately I wanted to figure out how to get it running with Tomcat, so that I could support virtual hosts on my server (meaning I could use Railo with any of my sites if I choose to).

I found a post on Nicholas Tunney’s Blog that was an excellent post for setting up Railo, Tomcat and Apache for Amazon EC2, but it works just as well for any server (because essentially that’s all you are doing). I recommend you start with that blog post if you are just getting started! If you need the full details, or you feel I’m lacking helpful detail, you can go to his blog post and it is explained VERY WELL. I had one key difference, and that is I run a number of virtual hosts with aliases, so I had to figure out how to set that up. I am going to put the steps I needed below.

So far, I am happy with the fact that I can drop a “.cfm” file into my website and immediately work with CFML. That alone is very encouraging, and will allow me to experiment with it.

Setup Steps

(on Ubuntu Server)

Again, I’ll warn you: I’m leaving out details since the blog post above does it very well. I’m just documenting the steps below to help me 6 months from now, in case I forget. The major difference is the set up of the alias in the Tomcat configuration. So once you read the Tunney’s post above, these will make more sense to you, and you’ll see where I ventured on my own.

Latest Updates

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Get the Railo Tomcat Installer

I went to the Railo Server Download page.

Look for the Railo Server with Tomcat 7 row and download the *nix run file that you would like. On a VPS, I still like to run 32 bit, because it seems to consume less resources…though 64 bit will probably be most efficient. I care about overall consumption, so I stick with the 32 bit until someone proves to me that I need to adjust my line of thinking.

Once you have the link, you can also do a wget command to download right to your server.

wget http://www.getrailo.org/down.cfm?item=/railo/remote/download/3.3.1.000/tomcat/linux/railo-3.3.1.000-pl1-linux-installer.run -O railo-install.run

Install Railo

chmod 755 railo-install.run

./railo-install.run

• Installation Directory [/opt/railo]:
• Tomcat Administrator Username [admin]:
• Tomcat Administrator Password []: (ENTER A PASSWORD)
• Tomcat Port [8888]:
• Tomcat System User [root]: railo (I like Tunney’s advice, and used railo over root)
• Start Railo at Boot Time [Y/n]:
• Install Apache Connector? [Y/n]:
• Please choose an option [1] : (Apache 2.2)
• Apache Control Script Location [/etc/init.d/apache2]:
• Apache Modules Directory [/usr/lib/apache2/modules]:
• Apache Configuration File [/etc/apache2/apache2.conf]:
• Apache Logs Directory [/var/log/apache2]:

Set up the Apache Proxy Modules

sudo a2enmod proxy

sudo a2enmod proxy_http

sudo a2enmod proxy_scgi

sudo a2enmod proxy_balancer

Add your Apache Virtual Host

(Replace MYDOMAIN.com with your domain)

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName MYDOMAIN.com
ServerAlias www.MYDOMAIN.com
DocumentRoot /home/mydomain/public_html
</VirtualHost>

Edit the Tomcat Server XML

(/opt/railo/tomcat/conf/server.xml)

This goes after the Catalina localhost entry.

<Host name="MYDOMAIN.com" appBase="webapps">
<Context path="" docBase="/home/mydomain/public_html" />
<Alias>www.MYDOMAIN.com</Alias>
</Host>`

Restart processes

The last thing I did was edit my .profile in my user directory.

cd

vi .profile

I added these lines at the bottom:

alias apache='/etc/init.d/apache2 restart'

alias railo='/opt/railo/railo_ctl restart'

alias bounce='apache;railo'

After that, I just type bounce in my terminal window after I log in and that gives me a full recycle of my web server.

It's hard to step outside of my body to reflect on who I am in my profession. As a developer I have that never-ending feeling that I am always a student…always learning…always behind. In reality, I'll always be trying to keep up with technology, but I have enough experience to know when something is not right. If you are reading this post looking for enlightenment, I may disappoint you. I have more questions than answers, but I had to get this out.

The Independent Developer

I came from a Microsoft Windows environment — large scale private sector enterprises and government agencies. I am also a user of Linux since the early days of the operating system. My attraction to Apple's OS X was the blend of the power of Unix/Linux, with the rich user interface. I stayed because I found a thriving ecosystem of independent developers building small applications to solve problems. It sparked an interest inside of me that I had not felt in years. As I focused more on web development on the Mac, I found a number of applications that fit my needs, and opened up new possibilities of creativity. Transmit, Coda, CSSEdit, Pixelmator, Things…I could go on. Xcode was free.

When the iPhone App Store opened up to developers, it was a gold rush. I read stories about overnight millionaires. It was exciting. I jumped in. I remember proclaiming that this same model would be wonderful for the Mac…but I don't think I completely understood what I was saying, or the direction this app store mentality would be taking.

The Consumer

As Apple reported record earnings, and people talked about the market share of Mac increasing, in my mind I pondered hundreds of thousands of people dreaming the same dream of making it big in the App Store. Buying Macs, and paying their developer fees. This feeling hit me early on in the App Store's life, but this was too new for me to completely understand.

• Developers were becoming consumers.
• Consumers were learning to become developers.
• We were all paying Apple.

Now, before I sound like I'm making Apple out to be a bad guy, a large majority of us screamed like there was no tomorrow when we were told we could only develop web applications. We wanted native, and we wanted it now. Apple delivered…with a hook, and we chomped down hard as we released our money. We placed our stamp of approval on this by purchasing and developing for what would become the iOS platform.

You can't tell me that companies like Microsoft, Google, Palm, RIM, et al, did not take notice. They did, and that is why everyone is creating app stores.

The Consumer Developer

We are in a new world, boys and girls. Being a developer is not just a profession anymore…it's a consumer product. We now have an ecosystem of hardware, software and fees to buy into a potential windfall and the glamor of quitting your day job to become CEO of your own company…oh, and rules…and controls…very restrictive controls.

This model is now being applied to writers, and providing the wonderful opportunity to publish books with "complete" independence. The question is, where is the fine line between a mutually beneficial relationship? You can be certain that all of these companies, especially Apple, will be testing us to see how far they can go with this.

I'm not saying it's all bad…but we should be proceeding with caution, and understand that the developer is now a very important source of income. I know in a way we always have been, but now we have our profession and creativity controlled and dictated to us by a number of third parties that look to us for their income.

Something to think about…

Ultimately I work on iOS, because it’s what I love.  It’s something that doesn’t seem like work to me.  It’s fun and exciting.

Humble Beginnings

A few years ago was a different story.  Objective-C and Cocoa were new and foreign languages to me.  iOS was not iOS.  It was secret.  You couldn’t share.  There was no documentation.  We all attempted to make fart apps.  We couldn’t figure out how to do anything else!  I ended up making two apps: A game, and a simple twitter app.  One did okay, the other was a misstep and flopped, but I learned a lot.

That was 2008.  Two years floated by as I explored other technology, made some career adjustments, and made a number of life and family adjustments for the better.  As I settled down once again, the Apple devices started beckoning me again.  So I picked up a book, and got back into the latest and greatest.  I was so happy to see so many of the frustrations in Xcode and iPhone development addressed and more characteristic of the “It just works” mentality that many of us have grown to love, and expect, from Apple.

Finding Answers

My mind still wandered in exploration of other methods of mobile development.  I asked myself smart questions like, “What maximizes my install base for this app?” and “Does this technology offer better income potential with less work?”  I even thought about what was most popular (thus better for my career options in the future). I even experimented with some of these methods of development…and it started feeling…corporate.

I was no longer in love with the idea, and the dream.  I was in love with the growth potential and marketability.  Luckily I snapped out of it as I sat one afternoon and asked myself, “What would I love to do?”  Love to do.  Love.  My eyes drifted over to my iOS Programming book…and there they stayed as I pondered…and remained consciously blank.  Then it occurred to me what I was doing, and I had already answered in a completely non-verbal, but powerful way.  It came from the heart.

Making it Happen

So now I take an hour here, and an hour there, and I’m working through an app that I wanted to make.  Something that seems fun.  In a topic that interests me.  It’s an app I’ll enjoy using.  It’s very different from the typical projects where money and success are at the forefront.  I will build it and nurture it…then I will share it, and we will see where it goes.

Check back later and we’ll see if the mantra of, “Do What You Love,” holds true for ultimately succeeding.

If not, I’ve enjoyed the time…

I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 around 1982 while my parents were in the university computer lab completing their lessons for their degrees, and I used it on an Apple II in Second Grade to freak out the guy telling everyone in the room what a computer was.  I remember it like yesterday. I wrote a quick script to make  as much noise as possible, causing the whole room to look at me thinking my computer was having issues.  The presenter, standing in a business suit, stopped his presentation, looked a me, and asked me if I knew how to program computers.  I said yes, and received the oddest look from him. Unfortunately I had no clue how this scene must have appeared in his eyes, or how much money I could have made back then!

So I continued my learning on the Apple II, and later in middle school as a journalism student, we produced our newspaper with the Apple II (c+, I think) around 1988.  Then Apple disappeared on me, never to be seen again.  They always seemed to be incompatible with everything else known to man, and PCs were cheap.  That’s what my father bought for home use.

Where did it go?

In 2003, while developing some information security software, I decided that I would make a Mac compatible version, and bought an iBook.  I had seen OS X Panther in CompUSA, and remembered the really cool dock, so it was also an excuse to explore my curiosity for what the Mac had become. I allowed my wife to use it while I wasn’t developing, and she took it over, never to be seen on a PC again.

Peer pressure.

Around 2005 I was a full time senior web developer, and all of my co-workers had Macs, while I was the Windows junkie.  I can’t tell you how old it got to listen to the ways my setup was inferior to anything on the Mac. When I received an unexpected bonus, I decided I would get an Apple laptop of my own, since my wife would never share, and I wanted to create pictures and videos for the family.  It was supposed to be a toy.  I bought a MacBook…and little did I know that they had just been launched, and were the first to sport Intel processors.  My new toy….

Every day after I finished working, I would play with my new toy…and I began to understand my wife’s affinity for the Mac.

Then about a week later, it sat on my desk, and I figured I’d try some web development.  So I asked my co-workers about software.  Immediately I was treated like I had become a part of a family…or a mafia.  They shared links, advice, and software recommendations.  I set up these little programs from independent developers all over the world…they were elegant…simplified…creative…well thought out…and useful.

I was hooked!

Three months later, I was coding full time — on my TOY, so I bought a MacMini to work on during the day…only it got worse.  Now I used BOTH to work all day, and it was a pleasure.  It was powerful. They were powerful. I was powerful. We were powerful, and I never looked back.

Then came the iPhone…

Then the iPad…

Apple has continually changed my life, and renewed my interest in computing, and creating software.  In fact, before the iPhone, I had planned to start developing software, and had been learning Objective-C and Cocoa.  The community of indie developers was very alluring to me.  The iPhone shifted my focus, and I developed my first iPhone app in 2008.

Not quite prepared.

It’s been a wonderful experience, and I’m so very sad to see Steve Jobs go.  I know he was exceptionally smart, and it would be out of character to have left Apple to flounder and die after his work to rebuild it.  I look forward to the future, and I know a lot of developers out there, like me, get enjoyment out of our profession because of his work.

Thank you, Steve.  You will be missed.  I hope your heart, mind and spirit lives on through all of us, and especially within Apple.