It's been over a year and a half since my last blog post? The time, it flies. There were a number of projects that kept me super busy during that time, and only recently did things slow down. It's a "good problem to have" as they say, but it's still a problem. :S
I ran into an issue recently with a Visual Force page I was generating for a project and thought I'd post about what I found, in case it can benefit anybody else. But first...
As designers/developers, I think we're incredibly uneasy with saying "I don't know". In a knowledge-based economy/industry, your knowledge is your currency, so I think there's pressure to appear like you know everything. A combination of being used to presenting a good front to the clients, looking up to rock stars in our industry who can "do it all", and general pride perhaps. The industry also changes so fast, new standards, new technologies, and there's always a fear of falling behind the curve.
I think that's a lot of weight to be carrying around, and we don't always realize it's there.
I've been in enough meetings to know that not everybody knows how to run them. (or at least how I think they should be run ;) Meetings are important, especially face to face, in order to define actions or gather requirements, build consensus in order to make decisions, keep people updated on where things are at, make sure the project is running smoothly and on time, catch problems before they're catastrophes, etc. Unlike some people, I don't think meetings are evil, but I do think that they can be misused and be unproductive when not run correctly.
Here's some things I try to keep in mind:
I recently had to do some research for a collegue who had some questions about "clickjacking", the practice of hosting a website inside a hidden or transparent iframe (the target), positioning that frame over top of another inocuous, innocent looking page (the attacker) that has a call to action. The user clicks what they think is something simple (like a video play button) but instead they're clicking on a page element inside the transparent iframe, initiating some action on the target website.
For example, an attacking website could get a user to login to their banking website without them knowing, depending on whether the user had configured their browser to autofill in their username and password on the site. The attacking site could go on to do lots of other things, tricking the user into transfering money or whatever.
Scary stuff.
Really sorry for the lack of posts for the last 6+ months. I've been underneath a massive project since before August, doing requirements gathering. (haha, Requirements: The Gathering....oooh boy) Then the project began in earnest in September and I pretty much disappeared, doing nothing but staring at Excel spreadsheets, writing documentation, running meetings, managing a small dev team and writing a little bit of code here and there.
It was all supposed to be done in December, but some under estimating on task time plus running into some historical data cleanliness issues have pushed things out. :P I'll have some Salesforce-related stuff to blog about after this is all done, but in the mean time here's a post about something I've been thinking about in the moments I have between deployments: Magic deck building.
Over the years I've earned a reputation as a ferverent, unrepentent note taker. I write notes about everything, scribbling stuff in an artist's sketch pad, typing madly in a text file or more recently thumbing myself reminders into my iOS-device. In meetings I'm constantly writing things down, summarizing discussions, making note of key points.
I'm not sure what it is, maybe it's because I don't trust my brain to remember, or maybe because it *helps* me remember or it's because I'm detail oriented. I do know that it helps me accurately hold the entire architecture of whatever it is I'm working on in my head, which makes it a lot easier to make informed decisions and weigh the implications of choices later on.
I thought I'd share a few tips 'n tricks about how I take notes, maybe you'll find something useful...
So I've been working with Salesforce for about a year now, as a developer and consultant, and something I've been running into a lot lately is code rot: code that lives tucked away somewhere and never gets updated 'cuz it's working and it was made by someone who's no longer in the picture and nobody knows what it does. Or code that has ceased to be relevant or used for months/years, but no one's stopped to go in and remove it. Or that thing that happens when you have a whole bunch of different people doing work on your SF org, and they're all from different companies and have different standards and levels of skill and so on, and nobody wants to take the responsibility of updating or fixing somebody else's current or old code.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote this haiku:
Thirty tabs had I
Closed the window, but not all
Now I have just one
A very common plight in our modern browser age, at least for those of us who are tab fiends. (I regularily have 20+ tabs open at a time and depend heavily on Firefox to remember what those tabs are) Browser crashes, or more likely, you accidently close a browser window with all your tabs that you thought was the main one, but it wasn't, and now Firefox doesn't have a record of what you had open. Painful.
Yes yes, I probably should not have that many tabs open in the first place, for issues of focus and productivity and "getting things done", and also for performance reasons, but let's ignore that for now.
UPDATE: In Spring '12, Role Hierarchies were added to the MetaData API, so you can use changesets or your IDE of choice to migrate role hierarchy changes. No need for this whole mess!!! Stop reading!! :)
Happy New Year! Sorry that I haven't been posting much at all in the past couple of months. The holiday was quite busy and so was work. I've had a number of articles "locked in the chamber" but just haven't been around to polish them up and pull the trigger.
Things are actually slower right now (kind of a good thing!) but I'm trying to make finishing up these articles a priority for the new year. So here's my first one, a list of games on various platforms that have gotten my attention over the past couple years...
