Digital Ninja

Another Neat Tool. ANT.

I learned a lot about it at the cf.Objective() conference a few weeks ago, and haven't had a whole lot of time to play with it. I did manage to tinker with it while I was at the office during a critical upgrade and there wasn't anything else to do while we waited for SQL Server to restore and sync replication. Man, if I had a nickel for every time I've said that!

Yeah, I know. Nerd.

Well, given my busy schedule at the office I've delegated someone to look into ANT and he's figuring out some great things. I'm feeling good about the fact that if he continues on the path he is on, we'll have an in-house ANT expert. And it won't have to be me. ;) Not that I don't want the title, I just have only so much brain power.

Delegation - it's not just a lazy man's tool!

The conference is over and I'm sitting in the hotel room trying to organize my thoughts. A four day conference on the most advanced ColdFusion techniques, frameworks, various design patterns, etc. can really make one's head spin. Without getting into specifics, let me see if I can take a breath and jot down what I thought of it all.

First, this was a first class meeting of the most brilliant minds in the ColdFusion community. As I understand it, there are programmers in other languages who would still scoff at that. To them I say they better take another look at ColdFusion. These experts are also experts in Java, design theory, etc. - I'm pretty impressed with all the speakers.

Second, I was somewhat correct in my last post about wanting to go home and change what we do and how we do it. It is mind-boggling when you see what can be done, what is being done, and you realize you could be doing the same. However, we have some things to consider before launching a bunch of new tools and practices. I was able to break everything down into a few categories:

• New practices - these are steps in the development process we don't even have, but can add to our pipeline with little-to-no disruption.
• Improved practices - We're doing some good things, but we can do them better and slightly different. There will be some disruption, but not too much.
• Replacements - Tools and techniques exist that simply blow away what we do. We should adopt some of these, and its going to be a rough ride to make it happen.

What needs to happen now is I must become an advanced user of each tool or technology I would like to see adopted across the team. I must then train the developers how to implement these technologies, and then we phase them in by either adopting each approach for new projects or blocking out time to refactor existing projects.

The bottom line is that we're accomplishing a good many of the right goals for a web application development team, but we're taking the long hard path through the desert with no water, no shoes, heading straight down razor-blade road and then wading across rubbing-alcohol river. This is no fun. What we do can be fun, and these new ideas and technologies can help us automate/eliminate the boring, the repetitive, the un-fun tasks.

Here goes nothing. :)