BenCurtis.com

Whoa, Google is coming to has arrived in my neighborhood. Now I’ll have to drive around and see if I can spot it. :)

One of our projects at work is in the requirements gathering/initial scoping phase. As with many web-based projects, determining the UI the customer wants determines a large part of the functionality the customer would like to have. That is, pictures can be worth a thousand words when it comes to building a requirements document. :)

At any rate, this is a good opportunity to write about one key aspect of building web applications more quickly and effectively: Do the mockups first, and then building a functional site will be much easier. You might also consider this the prototyping approach. If you can get a mostly-complete design of the UI, down to the fields that will be displayed and how they will be displayed, and then hand that design to the person doing the server-side development, construction will go much more quickly. At that point, the developer basically has to fill in the blanks, and once the mockups are made real, the developer is done.
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Before the term blog came into popular usage I had my own “personal news” driven by a PHP script that I wrote and backed by a MySQL database. I eventually gave it up after long periods of posting inactivity. Will I be able to keep it up now? I don’t know for sure, but I’ll give it another shot.

I’m planning on writing mostly about my experiences and thoughts about my work and my hobby, software development (specifically, development of web-based applications). It’s unlikely I’ll share anything completely new or ground-breaking, but hopefully I’ll be able to note some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way that will be helpful to someone else.