Since I made the move, I’ve been wearing two hats - that of freelance web monkey (or front end web developer) and that of Technical Director of Olivewood Data Technologies. The idea is that I would pay the bills by working short contracts as a freelancer, leaving spare time to work on web applications for Olivewood to sell. From day one it went straight off track! In addition to a few days a week working as a freelance resource for various web design agencies, I was offered a number of larger projects, which I took on under the Olivewood banner. After only a few weeks in I was juggling these larger projects with the on-site freelance work and soon had to start declining the on-site work, to make time for the larger projects.

Even dedicating all my time to the larger projects I was struggling so started to employ freelancers myself to delegate the workload. For a while this worked out, and it looked for a while like Olivewood might itself become a web design agency, using freelancers where needed, and starting to look into permanent employees. Some of the projects went really well, but it was getting difficult to manage the projects and find time to do any actual coding myself. So before I knew it I had become a project manager, albeit one who still tried to code and fulfill every other role in a snowballing company.

Meanwhile, very little progress was being made with the Olivewood products, so I was soon completely losing site of my original goals. I was also having other issues with finding and managing resources. I think one of the reasons I was offered so many projects in the first place is that I have a very diverse web development skillset (nb. i’ve started to refer to this as “swiss army knife” rather than the more negative “jack of all trades”!), so I ended up with projects spanning plone, front end web build, php, drupal, asp and asp.net. Finding local, available, freelancers with a similar skillset isn’t easy, and the time it takes to brief and manage remote freelancers made it extremely difficult to turn projects around on time and with a profit. Even so, it was still working, albeit only with me working most evenings and weekends - something I wanted to get away from by going full-time self employed.

Then I met my nemesis - a project I vastly underestimated, with a tight deadline and a tighter budget. Deadlines were missed and all the budget was spent on additional resources. Out of pride/stubbornness/professional integrity/stupidity I carried on, starting to decline other work, and push back other ongoing projects to make time to get the project finished, working ridiculously long hours throughout, and surviving on the profits of previous successful projects. This was a painful lesson in being careful what I agree to take on. It also forced me to re-evaluate the direction I was going in, and was fundamental in me getting back on track with the original goals.

So here I am now one year in, older, greyer and hopefully a bit wiser and on the verge of clearing my backlog of work to start afresh with a goal of keeping a balance on the work I need to take on to pay the bills and finding time to work on my future business goals. I recently had to decline a project that would have kept me busy for another month or so, which was painful but necessary. Turning down work is difficult, but the experience of the last twelve months has shown me that it is vital to be realistic.

In summary, it’s been a mixed bag - i’ve really enjoyed the freedom and excitement of being freelance, but I haven’t enjoyed the extra project management/ resourcing/ admin needed to run my own show. I’ve also learned the hard way about biting off more than I can chew. I’m still positive about it all - I see the difficult aspects as vital learning experiences that I needed to go through to get onto the next stage of my adventure.

Response.CacheControl = “no-cache”
Response.AddHeader “Pragma”, “no-cache”
Response.Expires = -1

import pdb
pdb.set_trace()

when the script reaches this set_trace() statement, you get a pdb prompt in the terminal allowing you to interact with the script and it’s variables at that point. e.g. print myvar to get the value of a variable or myvar.__class__ to find out what type of variable it is. You can also use ‘n’ to step through the script or ‘c’ to continue to the end.

Up until this point I relied on adding print statements in the scripts to try to work out what was happening - a bit like i’ve done for all my web dev over the years - a common mistake for me is to leave these in, then get confused clients asking why the word “here” and “foo=[1]” keeps appearing on their website!

You can also use a similar tool to debug zope skin scripts. This uses a similar principle - run your site in foreground mode, and you can interact with the skin script from the set_trace statement.

from Products.zdb import set_trace
set_trace()

I’ve been working so much recently, clearing a huge backlog of work that i’ve got into a habit of mobile working again, as a way of varying the endless hours sat staring at a screen. Despite having some lovely studio space, I find it helps my productivity to wander off and work in a few different places. The 3 mobile broadband has made this even more of a possibility now, not having to stick to places with free wifi, although I did fail to connect from the back of one cafe up in clifton. I’ve also been making the most of the weather with a bit of garden working

To be honest the classic asp works fine for most purposes, but is becoming increasingly obsolete, along with availability of developers, and I have been trying to move on from it for years. The obvious choice for migrating a classic ASP app would usually be ASP.NET, but frankly the idea of spending the rest of my working life tied into windows-only development, and the fighting with software licences and scarce availability (it seems, at least in this town) of contractors makes me want to give up try a different career altogether. So I decided on php a while back (mainly because I wanted something open source, with an abundance of developers - I think if you throw a coin randomly in the watershed in bristol, chances are you would hit a freelance php developer).

So with php decided on, I then spent time evaluating a few frameworks. They all look good - this was a difficult decision - but I decided on Zend because Olivewood will be primarily concerned with eCommerce and eProcurement, and with magento being built on zend, and the “big industry” partnerships, it seemed the right fit. It also seemed to be useful and provide structure without being overly prescriptive. Also by writing this here i’m hoping to commit myself to at least something!

So, I also wanted something that would work cross platform, even though the obvious choice is to run open source web apps on linux/ apache, it was important to me that it would also play nicely with IIS, as many businesses have already invested in windows servers and already run other apps on IIS and wouldn’t be happy supporting anything else. This gets an indignant response from many “purist” developers/ sysadmins, but i’m basing this on real-life situations, and I hate the idea of a potential client ruling out open source software because it won’t run on their IIS server.

The other factor here was that I wanted something that would coexist with my classic ASP app until such a time that I have rewritten everything I need to make it a pure zend framework/php app. The classic asp scripts will handshake with the php code by dumping session data to the database and passing credentials via a cookie, so the session data can be shared between the two. This is vital to the plan, as it is a long term project - and much of the investment in migrating this will be my own time and money.

Installing Apache on the same server and setting up some kind of proxying would be another option, but not on the live server that this app runs on. I also needed to prove that it would work on just IIS before betting my future business plans on it, even if the first thing I would do is suggest that it is run on Apache.

I wasted a monumental amount of time getting this working, although it turned out to be fairly trivial once I had cracked it. The red herring is that there are two versions of isapi rewrite - version 2 and version 3. All the zend related documentation I found (hardly any) seems to be for version 2 (although this wasn’t mentioned!), which I just couldn’t get to work at all for my setup, but eventually I gathered that version 3 has been almost completely rewritten to work with apache mod_rewrite rules. So now I have a classic asp app, with a single folder (caled “zend”) containing my front controller from where all the php will be served the application folder (with all the models, views, and controllers) is outside the site root.

My httpd.conf file looks like this:-

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /zend/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule !.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css|asp)$ /zend/index.php

Remember this is for version 3 of Isapi rewrite. All quite simple really, when you know how. It’s a pity it took me about 9 hours to work out how!

/**
* We try to set the correct cookie domain. If you are experiencing problems
* try commenting out the code below or specifying the cookie domain by hand.
*/

This has actually been quietly live for a while now, but wanted to monitor how it coped with the fairly heavy load exerted by the AJAX based mapping tool, which bought our dev server to it’s knees during original user testing, before being moved to a server with a bit more RAM.