Matthew Darby's Blog

I have been a software developer for nine years. It's pretty interesting to go back and look at old code, and if there were any, read over comments to remind yourself what you were thinking at the time when trying to tackle a particular problem. I have noticed that originally I was displaying strong object-oriented design but have now regressed into a procedural developer in some aspects of my recent applications.

I am a big proponent of using frameworks such as ModelGlue and Fusebox, and I currently use Coldspring to for dependency injection. It seems though when I take a step back to look at where my code is compared to what I did in the past, I see a lot of procedural code in many of the methods I have generated lately. Part of my reasoning behind looking back at where I have grown as a developer stems from the recent changes in my development team at work and reading through Ben Nadel's attempt to learn OO.

As I look to take on a new role with my team at work, I know it will be important for me to really evaluate what I do and why I do it in the planning and design phase of software architecture. While certain software patterns seem to almost fade in the background do their expected use, such as the model-view-controller, looking when it would be useful to implement the Factory patterns, or recognizing areas to help other members of my team be aware of different useful approaches will become important. So I am glad I have at least the foundation to rely upon to know how to be a pragmatic programmer. I look forward to the new challenges that lie ahead of me, but its nice to also be able to look back and see where I have come from.

In the past year the government institute I do contract work for has renewed its focus on 508 Accessibility. What this implied for us was ensuring all images utilized the alt tag as a means to provide a text description, or ensuring all tables had summaries of its data thus requiring the tables be for tabular data and not for design and layout purposes. It required a stronger knowledge of CSS and a better understanding of how screen readers interpret web pages. We traversed our text to ensure we applied the acronym tag were appropriate. It also meant that with what javascript we used that there was a alternative means to access the data depending on its usage, when javascript is turned off on the browser.

When addressing the strict adherence to the 508 policy for the government website, it made me look at certain web pages I do in other areas, such as my own or my dad's website. In doing so however, it does make it difficult to utilize certain technologies like extensive flash or ajax. The reason is that today's screen readers can not interpret actions that are not directly communicated back through the browser. This is unfortunate but it doesn't mean that flash or ajax are totally out of the picture to design accessible sites.

When I decided to redesign my blog after a two year hiatus, I downloaded the latest version of Ray Camden's BlogCFC code and went to work with the desire to make the two column default design transformed into the three column design I currently use. As I began make the appropriate modification i saw that to add comments that a javascript window is launched, so I continued to modify so that the comment form would be embedded in primary page. It seemed as though I have already become accessibility minded where before it never crossed my mind.

It is my hope that as technologies such as Flex, Flash, Silverlight and more become more prevalent in websites, that the accessibility assistance programs can catch up. As I look forward to learning more about programming in Flex, it would be a shame to find out many of the things I want to do with it, will only work for only a small portion of my intended audience

Well I have upgraded to the new BlogCFC 5.0. I had to make a couple of minor tweaks to get my layout to work smoothly but otherwise it was a pretty smooth transition.

For almost two months I left this blog for dead, during a time I was starting to pick up visitors no less. I knew before starting this blog I would need to be committed to one type of topic and stay with that. So I have decided to move discussion about my ColdFusion development experience and applications I have been coding over the past couple of months.

I know this isn't that glamorous of a topic for most of my initial readers but this is what I do, and if there is one thing I need to work on is my writing skill, this blog will help with that. Currently one of my passions is web development and so I will be sharing that with you. However, from time to time I will move out of the development talk and approach topics like religion, NC State, politics and whatever else happens to cross my mind.

I don't really care if no one views these posts. This will just be my outlet to work on my ability to communicate to a potential audience through writing while discussing a topic I love. I would hope that my writing skill continue to increase as the posts I make increases. If you are actually taking to the time to read this then I thank each and every one of you.

After two weeks of being down, my site is finally back up. It appears that a ColdFusion hotfix installed by my host disable this blog. During the time it was down, I had scratched my head bald, trying to figure out why my code mysteriously wouldn't work any more. I hadn't move any new code to the server prior to the outage and it worked fine without error on my development location.

Thankfully the error was found and the Coldfusion installation had to be rolled back. As a server administrator myself I take great caution performing update that could have an impact on all the application that are depending on every process working in precision. This further validates the need for backups. I put not only use Visual SourceSafe for my code but I make regular database backups for this site as well. When it comes to server administration keeping backups of configuration settings are crucial.

To date I still haven't spread the knowledge of this blog's existence to the full public yet. Only a select few know of its existence but that will change shortly. For those of you who know, I have been working on the primary web site for this domain. That is now live and you can view by going to http://www.matthewdarby.com. It will be a portfolio site for my work, which is somewhat different than the purpose of this blog.

At a later date I will combine change the display templates for either the blog, the main site or both so that they are both similar. However for now feel free to give me any feedback on what you see on either site.