Setfive would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy holidays. We hope everyone has a great holiday season. We’ll be bringing in the new year with a bang, and look forward to working with you.
Happy Holidays All!
JSON explorer for Firebug!
As Firefox plugins go, Firebug is definitely one of my favorites. It has saved me and the rest of the Setfive team dozens of development hours. One of the nicest features of Firebug is the NET panel. The NET panel allows a developer to monitor HTTP requests that Firefox is making during the course of a page’s execution. This is particularly useful to AJAX heavy applications because it allows a developer to easily debug XHR requests and responses.
Although this is great, the NET panel is severely lacking when it comes to dealing with JSON responses. Since JSON must be a legal JavaScript string, it can’t contain any line breaks. As a consequence, debugging long JSON strings is extremely painful.
This issue has been on the Firebug TODO list for some time. I figured this would be a good place to jump into the Firebug codebase. I dropped an email to the Firebug working group and received some great feedback. Honza gave me a template extension to extend the NET panel and provided some great insight and advice on implementing a JSON viewer.
After a couple of weeks of intermittent work, the JSON-Viewer extension is ready to play with. Honza has committed the code into the Firebug 1.4+ branch so if you grab a new build you’ll be able to use the JSON viewer.
Screenie:
Read more at Honza’s blog post
Importance of Having Technical Knowledge Onboard
Today I want to take the chance to stress the importance of having someone onboard that knows some technology. Through our experience we’ve often had clients who were mislead or taken advantage of by other technology firms. Whether it is being given poor advice or being overcharged for simple tasks, we’ve seen it quite a bit. In many of these situations a person with some technological knowledge would have saved them money and time.
What can a person with technical knowledge do?
- Know what questions to ask – “Do you provide documentation for your code? Do you use a framework? Is your code MVC compliant? etc.”
- Know when you are being taken advantage of – We’ve seen in the past many clients purchased servers and functionality they just don’t need. A technical person can make sure that you aren’t purchasing five servers when one will do, that you aren’t overpaying for simple hosting, etc.
- To help choose your development firm. It is very difficult to tell whether a firms code is good. If you do not have knowledge in the area, good code and bad code appear to be the same. Choosing the development firm for your project can make or break the project. If the firm chosen produces messy, inefficient code, it dooms your product before it is even launched.
- To monitor code quality. Once you’ve picked your development firm, it is important to check in now and then to make sure the quality of the code is of the caliber you are paying for. It is crucial to catch poor code in the beginning, to make sure the firm doesn’t continue to use the same coding style.
What if you don’t want to have a technical person on staff full time? Hire a consulting firm. Many firms provide assistance with choosing your development team and to monitor most of the technical aspects of the product. We offer these services.
Moral: Having technical knowledge onboard prevents your company from being taken advantage of and will often pay for itself in saved time and a quality delivered product.