Adam Christian

What happened?

As some of you may have heard, today I resigned from my position at Rearden Commerce. Leaving a company is never a fun thing, because you know how you feel when you hear that someone else is leaving.. and you can see it in people’s eyes. I have reminded myself multiple times today that I am still going to be 30 mins away, most of my communication with those people has been via email and IM and there is no reason for me not to stay in touch.

Why did I resign?

That’s a very good question. Let me preface this by saying that I really don’t have anything about Rearden that I can point at and say ‘this thing’ is why I left. Rearden is a great company, they were professional through out my entire experience there. They employ many very talented and driven engineers, and they have a great product. My gut feeling after spending some time there, is that they will do very well. The management team is very skilled and they know their market and niche extremely well. Every day I went to work I heard about a new major deal or a small company Rearden had acquired to contribute to their march toward owning the ‘Personal Assistant’ space.

When I first arrived there I struggled with two things, and ultimately wound up being my demise as an employee. I have an extreme passion for Open Source, being part of that community, and giving my time to contribute. So you are probably thinking, ‘Why didn’t I just do that on the side?’ — well the answer is that I did do it on the side and the results were slow and my sleep schedule paid the price. Rearden has a very business/enterprise specific niche at the moment, and building and deploying new features to those customers is a priority (as it should be), but I couldn’t stop my Open Source envy. 

Secondly, a overwhelming majority of their user base is using IE6. As a web developer — the last thing I do when building anything in client side JavaScript is to test it in IE6. I basically hold my nose, load the page and pray that things ‘mostly work’. Now I’m not going to claim that I can ever get away from doing this, but building really cutting edge features based on new technology becomes significantly less probable when you are catering to this crowd. I know that Rearden has some really cool future plans, and is publicly talking about bringing the application to the consumer market — but I’m impatient and I just simply didn’t want to wait.

What’s Next?

I am going to jump right into a gig with Slide Inc. as a Web Developer. However, before I get to any Web Development tasks I am going to be addressing a pretty serious need they have in their QA department. Slide currently has many applications that are used directly on their site, slide.com and on social networks (primarily facebook.com and myspace.com) and right now they have essentially no functional automation.

At OSAF I saw what a major difference automated testing can make, and the reason I am so excited about this is because I was a QA Engineer at one point manually testing a pretty complex web application (Cosmo) and I have seen how much a difference test automation can make in the release cycle, the development cycle, QA test cycles and simply the daily lives of your poor QA teams.

How am I going to accomplish this task you might ask? Thats the best part — I have fixed about 10 bugs in Windmill in the last week, and will be putting whatever effort is required into getting Windmill to a state where we can functionally automate all of Slides application testing. This looks to be a serious win for Slide, and a serious win for Windmill. 

At some point in the future, when I feel that this project is to the point where it can be maintained and built on by the Slide QA teams I will move on to Web Development tasks. At that point a smaller amount of time will still be allocated to maintaining Windmill, adding new features that Slide and the community need and working towards the next evolution of Windmill. That is quite a ways off in the future, so I will address all that when the time comes.

The rest of my ‘free’ development time, will be consumed by a project that I am involved in with the Mozilla Corporation. This project lives in the QA realm as well, and could probably be classified as a distant cousin to Windmill. More details about that will be announced the week of OSCON, so keep your eyes pealed.

Change can be extremely tough, but it is also very exciting. I want to thank all of my former peers at Rearden for a good experience, and I wish them all the absolute best.

As a web developer you are probably aware of that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you suffer when posed with the idea of testing your freshly written JavaScript that works perfectly in FireFox.

For years now, we have had to ’suck it up’, and pour a glass of scotch to get through an afternoon of testing in IE. As I am now a Web Developer at Rearden Commerce who currently caters to an audience of enterprise users instead of your standard bay area geek population — I have to make sure everything I commit works nicely in IE.

Last week after a few hours of IE testing, and dirtying my code I worked so hard to perfect and refine with alerts everywhere I decided that there HAD to be a better way to do this. I went ahead and spent many hours searching the web, installing everything I could find that promised to make IE development easier and happily I can say — it was a success.

First and foremost however, there are a few tips I can give you right off the top that will make your life easier. Before you take the plunge into line by line alerting, go through your code and do the following;

* Remove unnecessary commas in your data structures:

( FF ignores this one, but IE will give you an error that isn’t helpful )
ex.

var superNinjaObject = {
me: 'adam',
home: 'oakland',
};

* Don’t try to access characters in a string as if it was an array:

( Works in FF, but IE will simply give you undefined and not tell you a thing )
ex.

var myString = 'Welcome to the Jungle';
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString[14]; //Broken in IE
$('mynode').innerHTML += myString.charAt(14); //Compatible alternative

Now we can get to what you are really interested in, the new tools:

1. Internet Explorer Development Toolbar

Get It: Microsoft Downloads

This is Microsoft’s best stab at a firebug equivalent. This gives you all the flexibility you need to inspect the DOM tree, look at CSS, Scripts, Images, Network etc. To put it simply, it makes IE development something you can swallow. I can’t image going back to IE development without this. Unfortunately it is missing two things, the first is the absolutely necessary JavaScript shell. This can be solved by using the IE JS Bookmarklet that you can find at blog.monstuff.com. Add this to your favorites and then whenever you need a JS shell, pop this up and hack away ( I agree it would be nicer if it was built in ). The second is the ability to set breakpoints and step through your code debugging and introspecting objects and variables. I do have a solution for this, see new tool number

2. Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

Get It: Microsoft Express

This is the solution to your break pointing, stepping, introspecting needs. The way you use it is a bit awkward, but it does complete the development experience. To use this you need to create an empty web project and then start debugging. This will launch IE and bring you to a blank server page off the local MS web server instance. At this point you can go ahead and plug in the URL of the app you are wanting to test. Additionally if you have set any ‘debugger;’ statements in your source it will pick that up and automatically ask you if you want to start debugging there, or continue on. When you stop the debugging session in VWD it will kill your browser, so beware if you have to navigate to some deep point in your app you are probably going to get frustrated if you write buggy code. At it’s 1.4 Gb space requirement it’s hardly a comparison with firebug — but it’s certainly a step up from alerts all day long.

3. Microsoft Script Editor

Get It: Jonathanboutelle.com

If you don’t already have it installed, a good midpoint between nothing and Visual Studio Express is the Microsoft Script Editor which comes with office 2003, heres a video on how to use it, Video. Thanks for the feedback blogosphere.

I hope this made your life at least a small amount easier, happy IE developing.