Dan's Drivelings

Unless you’ve been coding under a rock since ColdFusion 4.5, you’ve likely noticed the massive momentum behind object-oriented design and development in the ColdFusion sphere over the last 2 to 3 years. I love the idea of designing apps using object-oriented techniques–so much so that I’m presenting a session titled “OOP: What is it and why do I care?” at NCDevCon next month. After a while of developing OO-style applications you can get really spoiled to that way of writing and organizing code.

As a consultant, I get the opportunity to work for a wide array of companies and an even wider array of projects–not all of which are designed and built using the latest and greatest OO principles. Sometimes you can fall into the trap of thinking how you’d do a certain thing in an object-oriented way when the application you’re working on is written in a (good or bad) procedural manner. As tempting as it might be to scrap the client’s procedural code and write a shiny new OO block of code, you have to step back and remember what the client is paying you to do and decide if that’s the best use of the client’s money.

Unless the client is specifically paying you to refactor an older application, sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense to change the way the client’s application works so drastically. Sometimes you just have to “forget” all the OO goodness that you’ve learned to love over the last couple of years and go back to the “old” way of doing things in order to best service your client. It may not be fun, exciting or cutting edge work, but there are still a great number of procedural applications out there that we might be called upon to work on.

Disclaimer: This post was written as a “note to self”, not as an indictment of anyone that I have worked with.

After separating from active duty with the US Air Force in early 1998, I took a job working at a telecommunications company located in Brentwood, TN as a desktop and server support IT guy. About 6 months after I started, the company advertised an open position for their first full-time web developer. I applied and, owing to their policy of trying to “hire from within” first, I was chosen to fill the position.
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For those of you that normally come here for technical information, this post is completely non-technical and I’ll understand if you decide to spend your valuable time somewhere else.

As the title of this post suggests, I made it through what some people refer to as the “black birthday” yesterday. According to some statistic I found online, white males in the USA have an average life expectancy of 77.1 years. Pessimists would say that means I’m slightly over half dead. Optimists would respond with something along the lines that I have nearly half of my life in front of me. I’m really in neither category as I prefer to focus on things that I can make an impact on today (or plan today for things that I’m going to have to deal with in the near future).
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Here’s hoping you all have a very Merry Christmas and a super New Year!

That’s what I’m doing today thanks to a relatively freak accident with a staple gun yesterday. I won’t bore you with the details (that would confirm what a bonehead I can be sometimes). Just suffice it to say that, it could have been a lot worse.