Andrew Powell

Any developer worth their salt will admit that they do not know everything about their trade. Anyone who does is either a fool or delusional. Plain and simple. With this premise in mind, let's proceed. In the past seven years or so, something wonderful has happened. Developers have really taken to blogging (obviously). This has lead to an unparalleled compendium of knowledge about every development language used today. If you run into an error, or problem that you can't solve, you can turn to a developer's best friend and strongest tool for an answer: Google. If you need a code sample, tutorial, error fix, or bug fix there's a good chance that someone else has already run into it and blogged about it. Just search it. If someone has not blogged your particular tip or fix, go ahead and add to the compendium and blog it yourself. Only you, the developer who uses this great resource for help can add to it. This is a call to arms to developers to try to blog at least one tip or code trick a month for this year. If you do that, we can keep adding to and expanding this wealth of knowledge we have available on the Internet. According to Google Analytics, most of my traffic comes via search engines, and to a smaller extent aggregators. This tells me that people are using search engines more and more to help them with their development. We are, as a community, in essence, training each other. The real kicker to this though is that the other day, I was googling how to do something with Spry and came upon my own blog with the answer. What a kick in the gut that was. I guess it's at the very least, just a bit ironic. I was helping myself with an answer. Go figure.

When building Flex applications, I always use Service Capture to help debug remoting calls. Well, it turns out that with SC version 1.2.22, it will not read the AMF data coming from BlazeDS. It will read the data sent to BlazeDS, but not the data coming out. I am sure this will be fixed soon, but a head's up to anyone else running into this problem.

It's been a while since I made the initial announcement, but I wanted to throw a reminder out there. Universal Mind is offering Spry training and has since version 1.4 (pre-release). The training is a three day, hands-on course covering Spry DataSets, Spry Widgets, and Spry Effects. The end result is that you will walk away being able to integrate Spry into your applications. Please contact us if you have any further questions, or are interested in the training.

Thank you to everyone who came to my session today on using Spry & ColdFusion. I have been giving this presentation now since January and think I have it fairly well refined, but there is always room for improvement. I was made aware that my slides are not in the conference book, so I am including them in the zip file here. If you didn't make the presentation today, but would still like to learn more about Spry & ColdFusion, I am giving a repeat session on Saturday at 9:45AM. If you did see the presentation, and want to know more, please come by and see me at the Universal Mind booth in the exhibit hall. Number one on my schedule tomorrow is fellow UM consultant Thomas Burleson's talk on continuous testing. He has a nifty new tool he will be debuting that will help keep your test shells in sync with your code. Being a big fan of TDD, I will not want to miss this. One last note: Universal Mind has developed a curriculum for Spry training. If you are interested, please come see me at the Universal Mind booth and we will work on getting you locked in for a training session. BTW, big thanks to the ColdFusion team for helping me get one of my demos working!

1. Headphones, good ones - As much time as you're going to spend on a plane, a good set of noise cancelling headphones is a must. They're also a good help for when you're in a noisy environment and need a little bit of extra focus.
2. A Sturdy, dependable laptop bag - This has to be able to stand up to getting beat up again and again. It needs to be able to get you through the airport quickly and not make you be "that guy" in line at the airport.
3. iPod, or other mp3 player - see item 1
4. Mouse - Not some dinky travel mouse, a real honest to goodness mouse. Bluetooth if you've got it to avoid more cables than you need.
5. Frequent Flyer/Hotel Rewards/Rental Car Club Membership - You travel enough, why not reap the rewards? All that travel will eventually pay off in a vacation somewhere without cell service.
6. Quart Sized Ziploc Bags - Damn TSA.
7. Batteries - Be it for your mouse, or your laptop, you can never have enough batteries. I generally carry a pack of AA's and a charged spare for my laptop. Between these two, I'm usually set for wherever I have to go.
8. Business Cards - I've been burnt by this one a couple of times. You never know when or where you'll run into a lead.
9. Broadband Modem - Hotspots are expensive. Not every hotspot is in every airport. Having a broadband modem (Sprint & Verizon are the best) will keep you from having multiple hotspot accounts and give you the flexibility to get online even when there's no wi-fi to be found.
10. A suitcase that will fit (wheels first) into the overhead bins - Let's face it, time in the airport is time wasted. If you don't have wait at the carousel to get your bag, then all the better. I've been able to count less than an hour from the time the plane the touches down to the time I walk into the client's office on Monday morning. That, and it keeps you from spending any more time in the airport than you have to. I say this because I had a bad experience once where I went from ATL -> JFK -> CDG -> TXL. I ended up in Berlin, like I should have. My bags went from Paris to Rome. Never checked another bag since then.

This is my list, and I'm sure you have your own, so feel free to post in the comments.

I will be speaking at the the Nashville CFUG tonight on Integrating Spry and CF. This presentation will be broadcast via breeze. Find all the details at the Nashville CFUG website.

Spry Training & Mentoring is now available from Universal Mind. The program is held onsite, at your office, and offers hands on instruction. Topics covered include Spry datasets, widgets, & effects, XML Generation and application proxies, Database XML generation, and performance tuning for high-load applications. You will learn from experts who have real-world experience implementing this exciting new technology. At the end of the training, we will look at your code and aid you in your implementation of Spry so that you have a strong base of knowledge from which to start. This is the most comprehensive Spry training available today. If you are interested in this program, please contact Universal Mind via the link provided to the left in the "Hire Me" section.