Month: February 2018

Best practice in web development???

This is not a blog post to show what is best practice in web development but a rant against those people who use the term ‘best practice’ to defend their use of a technology.

I shall explain with a couple of examples. Yesterday at work a developer said the business could not have a web page with 5 even columns on the page because they use bootstrap which uses a 12 column grid. I tried to point out this was an issue and was told using Bootstrap was ‘best practice’.

We are building a new website and it HAS to be hosted on AWS because it is ‘best practice’.

We are building a new website in PHP and we have to use a framework because that is ‘best practice’.

I have nothing against Bootstrap, AWS or PHP Frameworks but this highlights that people are building a solution before they have even looked at the requirements. Each project is unique and has unique requirements so to come to the conversation with a fixed mindset of what solutions will work is just plain wrong.

It could be that these solutions are the best thing for the project but you can’t decide that because it is ‘best practice’. You have to decide that because it is best for the project.

Amazing nmap

So I was asked at work the other day if I could help find a missing server. I know that sounds odd but it was running some software that nobody had ever needed to use but was considered essential. They did not know the IP address or the user name or password used to gain access.

I had come across nmap in the past and never really understood how useful it could be. And then as part of my studies I learned of its amazing range of facilities. So after 5 minutes of research(dabbling). I found an invocation that would show me every single open port on every single device on the network. After filtering that down a little I had some potential devices we could try.

I am not sharing the nmap invocation because that would give away what I was looking for and possibly why.

Obviously that does not get you the access you need but perhaps that is the subject of another blog post.

Keeping things Simple

When I started out in development (many years ago) I wanted to write everything myself. I did not want to use any shortcuts or use other tools that would cue the time. I wanted to write those tools. And then use them myself. This was also supported by a need. I started to develop at the age of 11 when the internet was probably just another military secret. So coding things yourself was almost essential. Books were great but only got you so far.

However, as I have got older (not convinced wiser) I have got more and more lazy and see very little merit in building something when someone else is already done most of the work for you. So on my latest project I am going for very simple metric. Write as little of your on code as possible. Less chance of you adding errors that way.

It also means that you can go quicker to market than if you are trying to hand code everything. The purist in me (buried very deep) tells me that I could probably do a better job that would suit the needs of the business better. But, and this is something that only experience brings, the business I am working for don’t actually care what the technical underpinnings of the solution are. They want their solution and they will want it to be easy to maintain.

This causes a couple of problems. One writing simple code with few lines of code is incredibly difficult to do and those young developers that work for you are going to rebel and want to move on to some other more exciting (i.e. writing more code) project. But one day I am hoping they will also see that writing all of this code is only worth it when you really have to.

Masters Modules

So I got my grades for my second module of my masters over the weekend and was pleased with the grade but a little frustrated with the lack of feedback.  So on some elements I obviously did very well and others I was down at 60% and 65% but with no explanation of what areas I could have covered that would have got me those marks or areas I should have considered.

I am assuming that is it based on a grade for applying a more critical analysis of my answers but I really do not know.

Me WordPress NEVER!

I wanted to create a simple blog and I could not be bothered to code one myself. So I thought I would look around for a good blog system.  And you know the only one that was easy and took no set up time, thanks largely to LCN.COM, was WordPress.  So here I am with my very first WordPress site.

I will say the main reason for reluctance in the past was based mostly on security.  And now for the purposes of this trivial site it seems and irrelevance really. So here I am and here I will remain for a while and see how many if any blog posts I get out using this rather than having to code things by hand.  I have got too lazy for that.