This week I’ll be at the combined DemoCamp Guelph and KW Social Media Meetup. There may be a few more GiantGoat Web Development staffers there (since it’s a stone’s throw from our offices).
Speaking of DemoCamp, I’d like to give a shout-out to EQL Data for productizing & releasing their Microsoft-Access-to-web synchronizing products. I was impressed when Avery demoed their beta a few DemoCamps ago and it’s exciting to see what they’ve accomplished.
Twice in one day people have now asked me for advice on debugging tools, so I want to give a quick shout-out to two of my favourite tools, Stack Overflow and Fiddler:
Stack Overflow is the brainchild of programmer cum blogger-divas Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that makes programming questions easy and rewarding to answer. Their fanatical dedication to usabilty and gamelike scoring system quickly made it the place to ask software development questions. You can see my score (133) reflects how rarely I’ve been able to ask questions that weren’t already available. Best use: whenever anyone tells me something is impossible, I ask Stack Overflow.
Fiddler 2 is transitioning from Microsoft employee side project to free Microsoft product that fits in the stack between a browser (or other program that communicates over HTTP) and lets you see (and muck around with the communication). It’s an essential part of my standard security screening, but it’s also helpful for debugging.
Weird as it feels to link to a post about the eponymous #2 official in the Department of Interior but I was smitten by this graph:
One of the ways we add value for our customers is making their information to understand (if I had a nickel for every font I made bigger…), so this graph hit a sweet spot by throwing 3 pieces of data on a 2-axis graph, the x-axis is the cost per unit of reduction, the y-axis represents the reduction, and therefore the area is the cost of a reduction.
I normally pride myself on not being cutting edge — it helps me communicate with our many customers who don’t twitter — but I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 the day it came out.
Why? Because they fixed the two things I care about:
At GiantGoat we tend to use Firefox as our primary browser — one of us has gone so far as to call it sexy. I keep wanting to love Chrome‘s slick design, but I can’t live without 2 Firefox plugins:
Conclusion: Dave loves Firefox.
