And then he was gone

My partner in crime who I wrote about Thursday left us on Friday. He's a contractor, and can leave anytime, but to come back from lunch & 2 meetings to "I'm gone as of 5 PM today" is, well, a shock. We half-expected it but not so fast.

So now I'm the only web guy on this project. Up side - I have complete control and I'll surely get an ego boost from it all. Down side - everything falls onto my shoulders.

I have Atom?

Just looked at my Publishing tab here on Blogger and I saw atom.xml listed. So I guess I do have RSS feeds. My other requirements below stand.

Freemind update

OK, I figured out how to link nodes. Ctrl-Shift-Click & Drag. So now my map is getting really messy.

Got a craving...

Brian Clark's post today about his thesis got me jonesin' for a trip to Maxfield's in Potsdam. Great bar.

Freemind?

Oleg has been using Freemind for a little while now, and I've started playing with it tonight. I'm not sure what to make of it thus far. I'd like to be able to link nodes in different branches but I've yet to see how. Or maybe that's not a "real" usage. I guess I need a guide on how to use it, someone to show me the way.

Coder? Programmer? Developer? Architect?

Where do you fit in. I consider myself the 3^rd. I don't see each individual page (I'm a web developer) as a singular, standalone piece of work. Rather, they're all parts of a larger system. If I see commonality, I build a function in an include file. I'm killing off my objects when I'm done with them. I'm conscious of my performance and memory usage. I try like hell to not repeat myself.

But my partner on my current project, I'm just surprised. I thought he was more experienced than I, but he's not seeing things as part of a larger system. I've spent the last 4 days cleaning up memory leaks, extraneous code, performance bottlenecks, what have you. I've found issues in my own code, to be sure, but the major issues were in his. And I'm still hunting them down.

Is it really that difficult to use Option Explicit from the get-go? Use With blocks? Create sections of HTML with response.write, instead of interspersing ASP inside the HTML? I'm fine with doing a copy & paste job to get started with a page, but if you don't change anything in what you pasted, and have identical code in 2 pages, why not put it in an include both pages use? Why have an If statement which has 99% identical code in both branches, the only difference being the class applied to one HTML element? I just don't get it.

So we were having memory issues on our servers with this app. Lacking a profiler, all I have is Task Manager. I've managed to cut the vast majority of memory issues out. Memory usage is way down. Performance is up (how much, I'm not yet sure). In 4 days I've cut about 1000 lines of code (out of a 22K LOC app) and optimized numerous pages. I'm not done yet, but I'm going after the big hitters for now.