Matthew Darby's Blog

I have now been in web development for seven years. I got into it while in college. I built my first web page with notepad and made a simple profile page that today anybody could do. I was proud of my work. My first real web application consisted of constructing a form that stringed a few hidden parameters across multiple pages so that users could order off of a catering menu. Upon it's creation I thought it was the coolest thing. I still have the code in one of my old hard drives. The language I wrote that application in was one I had not heard of before receiving the opportunity.

At the time, I was on my summer break working an internship that was nothing more than a blessing from God. Back in school, I was struggling to matriculate into Computer Science learning Java and C++. This internship, however, provided me a chance to learn something totally different. Little did I know, it would lay the foundation on what I consider to be a great career. I was hired to work in the IT department, installing computers, punching telephone lines, providing technical support. The company changed its name so a rebranding effort gave me the opportunity to explore something no one else in my department had any expertise in. I became involved in revamping all of our intranet sites.

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Outside of writing blog posts, I am not a public speaker. My dad, a preacher, and my mom however, have no problem with the spotlight. As a kid as was more adapt to hiding behind them. Today, I will give my first public presentation ever, outside of teaching a Sunday school class at my church. Jim Priest, the Triangle Area Coldfusion User Group manager, has invited me to give a presentation on Mura CMS.

Yesterday, I did my first dry run in front of an audience. I invited some of my coworkers to help critique my timing, information I covered and my effectiveness in presenting. Things didn't go as well as it did when it was just me in my apartment speaking to my TV. However, there were a lot of lessons learned and I think from that experience I was able to make my presentation better.

Today, I will introduce Mura CMS. This is a coldfusion based content management system I have been playing around with for the last few months. My audience will be like minded coldfusion developers here in this area. My goals are to cover some of the basic and more fascinating features of this web application software and what it can do for both technical and non-technical people alike. Mura CMS is the new kid on the block and it has some promising features that can help open the door for people looking to alternatives to other content managers like FarCry and Word Press. These types of tools are what aid people to manage content like the one you are reading this blog post from. Mura can also help to bolster the ColdFusion community by bringing in people who might not be familiar with Coldfusion as a web application service that competes with the like of .NET and PHP. Hopefully, people will be able to take away the things that can be accomplished on the fly with the software.

So if you are in the Research Triangle Park area please come out at 6 pm, at the SRA building, 2605 Meridian Parkway, Suite 200, Durham, NC. Hopefully, the people will learn something, and I won't stumble through my presentation.

I just finished reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Programmers. It covers why and how to organize your thoughts effectively. Since reading the book, I have been taking steps to record my thoughts and have been and paper handy when I do find myself in situations where I am might come up with a solution to a problem I have been working on away from the area and time I was originally tangled with the issue.

Initially, I created this blog with the purpose to help me to become more efficient in my written communication, however this is now my first blog post within a year. In between that time I have joined Twitter and have become more active in my updates to Facebook where I at least post something there on a daily basis. I find myself throwing off my need to post here though, not without a lack of something to post on but instead not setting the time aside to do writing.

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.