About
My Work History
I have been a web developer for about 9 years now. I started my development career maintaining an intranet, adding features as I felt like it – nobody really had a use for intranets in those days apart from using it as a telephone directory – the wild west days of intranet development!
My next gig was working for a small company that developed sites for the wine industry. In hindsight the business model that the company worked to would be what is now known as Software As A Service (SAAS). My role here was being relegated to working on clients’ interaction with their own website. The economy was just about recovering from the dotCom bubble burst and blogs were slowly starting to become the next big thing. Sadly the wine industry was just not developed enough to embrace our product. The big boys at the high end had their own in-house development teams and everyone else just wasn’t all that interested.
Skipping over the next job which lasted only 3 months (it was a 3 hour commute everyday), I now work for another small company developing their own website in the alternative lifestyle social networking scene. We recently migrated from classic ASP to .NET 3.5 and I’m proud to say that I had a big hand in the setup of our new system. I streamlined the development process by binning Visual Source Safe (for new code) and using Subversion as our source repository.
As part of our release cycle, we have a few environments that we test our code on. In the bad old classic ASP days moving code from one environment to another was a painful process. It involved manual copying, deployments from VSS, changing of database connection strings and meticulous attention to detail. Deployments used to take half a day – this was for a site with just over 100 asp files – thankfully them days are gone 
So now we have a funky Continuous Integration Server (CruiseControl.NET) coupled with Subversion and Trac. The holy trinity of development environments (although all the cool kids swear by GitHub). With just these three tools we can now commit code, have it built automatically, have it deployed to the correct place automagically (with environment specific variables changed), run Unit Tests automatically as part of the build process and report any failures AND also see what the rest of the team have been doing in Trac. I won’t pretend that setting it up wasn’t painful at times, but at the end of the day we’ve ended up with an almost completely free open source development environment.
