The Byte Stops Here

We're looking for a Sr. Web Developer/ Technical Lead / Architect type person in Southern California.

You would be working on a ColdFusion-based SaaS web application. Its a very driven and dynamic company. I can't say enough! You will be working on a product that changes the lives of millions.

Obviously our application is built using best practices and a touch of practicality - Mach II, ColdSpring, and Reactor. We will probably be doing ColdBox in the future.

Read more about the company @ www.ecivis.com.

Feel free to leave a comment, and I can provide more details.

UPDATE: You can also email me at technology <at> ecivis.com.

Times are tough. We have less money, and less resources. My team has gotten smaller and our budget is in lock-down mode. In these times, demand for performance increases while resources decrease.

Fortunately for me, I soon discovered Balsamiq Mockups. Our company has gotten more distributed, and the usual face to face meetings, and whiteboard work needed in the past, now needed to be done in a fashion that made it easy for people to communicate over email and was easy to manipulate (read: something that played well with our rapid development environment). I personally do not like Visio, and other heavier tools. I needed something light-weight, that could take numerous iterations with ease.

And text goes only so far. We don't have GUI personnel on staff anymore, so I couldn't have someone else do this either. I started off a discussion about the new features via email, and having described the new page in our app, I kept getting more questions. Guess what? Everyone else is busy and overwhelmed with work just like me, and they too needed a quick (read: visual) interpretation of what I was thinking.

So I went to Balsamiq's website and tried their web-based version. I was able to create a visual version of the page I was communicating via email in less than 5 minutes, and took a quick screenshot and sent it off to the same folks. Guess what, I got agreement shortly thereafter.

Take a look at some of the sample creations on Balsamiq's website. Best of all, its written in Adobe AIR and is continuously being improved.

Payoff: Big time! | Ease of Use: High | Software Cost: $79

I've used some of the company's other services in the past, and I just received an email for some promotional pricing for Web Load Testing.

Their email says:

"We would like to inform you about new Monitis web stress testing service (http://www.webloadtester.com). WebLoadTester allows instantly check your website load handling capabilities. You can enter many URLs, number of nodes, duration and number of simultaneous users to generate web stress test. There is a special promotional price $1.98 per each order regardless of number of URLs, nodes and clients. The offer is valid till 2/15/09."

Looking at the site, it looks very interesting, and could prove useful.

Does anyone have experience with them?

Steve Bryant released Mailer.cfc Version 1.8 a couple days ago.

We use this CFC extensively (w/ ColdSpring) to provide a single point for sending mails. No more CFMAILs strewn throughout the app.

If that isn't enough of a benefit, its chock loaded with features, include the new "sender" header I asked for, which allows you to send email "On Behalf Of" other people. In other words, if you pass the CFC:

• From: a@xyz.com
• To: b@xyz.com
• Sender: c@xyz.com

It will send the mail from "c@xyz.com On Behalf Of a@xyz.com". All replies go to "a@xyz.com". This functionality comes in handy when you must send mail on behalf of a user, but from your mail servers which may mark the email as spam. Our government clients are very particular about email, SPF settings, and resist whitelisting, etc.

Posting a lot of links today. This is a good read like the others.

Download PDF: Seven Deadly Dangers