Best Practices are Best, Except When They're Not

  • Apr 8, 2015
  • Nolan Erck

Speaker:  Nolan Erck
April 8, 2015

A code-review of sorts where we go over some of the real-world situations when things just don't go the way the Stack Overflow Gods say they should. We'll look at the pros and cons of solutions in these situations and the lessons hopefully learned along the way

Objective of the topic

We all see lots of "well I would never do it THAT way" comments on blog posts, mailing lists, and the all-mighty Stack Overflow. But what about when you HAVE to do it that way? Let's look at some of these situations and talk about different solutions that might not be the most elegant, but solved the problem, and helped us learn something for making the next version of our app better.

Target Audience

Developers that write apps in the real world, that have deadlines, and have to solve real problems that don't always fit nicely in a box.

Assumed Knowledge

Intermediate level of ColdFusion (or similar language) and some experience with OOP (but by no means will you need to be an expert...in fact, if you call yourself an 'expert' you'll probably think this talk is beneath you...and if that's the case, I'd encourage you to attend even moreso. ;)

Main Points

  • When is it BETTER to have errors emailed to the team instead of stored in a logging tool (Yes, there is a time for this).
  • Can you do things like add Bootstrap to an old table-based web app? (Yes, there are still some of these out in the wild.) And what happens when you do so?
  • An explanation of technical debt and why it's important.
  • Some real code situations where incurring a little technical debt was necessary.
  • Some lessons learned when these situations have presented themselves, so we can improve things in the future.

Presentation Links

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software professionally for more than 15 years, starting in the video game industry as a Tools Programmer, and advancing to web development in 1999. He has worked on high profile projects for LucasArts, Maxis, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, Schools Credit Union, and Alive N Kicking Magazine among others. His list of credits includes Grim Fandango, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, SimPark, and SimSafari, as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of technology based companies.

Nolan has been consulting full time since 2007, working on web and mobile projects, as well as teaching classes on many facets of software development. Nolan ran the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group for 4 years and now runs SacInteractive, an "all things web and mobile development" group. He is an active member of the Web Developer community, giving presentations on Object-Oriented Programming and Web Development across the country.

When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.