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• September 2nd, 2007

  Want to expand on my marketability as a web developer. What language should I learn?

  The answer might depend on context in which you envision yourself using the new skills. If, by “marketability”, you mean, “attractive to corporate development managers”, ASP.Net would be what you want to look at. I manage a team of developers for a successful corporate (mid-cap) organization and we are doing quite well with both C#/ASP.Net and Java. Off-hours, though, I spend time looking at Python (yes, it rocks) and Ruby. Don’t think for a minute that either of those choice will not provide value for you. Django and Rails are great example of what can be done with a web application framework. Those lessons will work elsewhere. If you are looking to position yourself in a smaller shop or a startup space, the Python/Ruby path will be of more value to you than would be ASP.Net. I’d worry less about the scalability issues. Truly, they are more a function of the architecture of the application and the underlying framework than the language itself. (Having said that, Ruby is slow.) Moving beyond PHP is an excellent idea in this market. You have some good choices here. If you want to touch on all of them, you would get yourself more familier with C# and the .Net Framework and then move on to IronPython and IronRuby…a long haul, for sure, but you would get the best of all worlds, maybe. As for CF…pass on this. The work you are finding is probably maintenance stuff. I am not sure a see a future here. Not sure if it is worth the investment of your time.
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• July 4th, 2007

  What would you like to see in a CMS?

  I'd have to agree with sferik on this one. If a "microkernel"-style PHP CMS is what you are looking to work on, I would highly suggest looking into developing module for Drupal than rebuild a new system from scratch. I'm never one against building a better mousetrap, though. So, if you choose to build ground up I would review the Drupal core for 1) architectural inspiration and 2) to see what it does not do well (or is missing) to help you build a feature set. Same could be said for ezPublish or the newest version of Mambo. Either way, best of luck.
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• June 29th, 2007

  How do I do a MySQL Insert statement into 2 different tables?

  Shouldn't be possible since this would not be ACID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID
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• June 29th, 2007

  I have a revolutionary idea for a web application and I don't know what I should do with it?

  A partner (particularly a strong developer in this case) is a good idea not only for the moral and business support, but also because external parties (think VCs) generally feel better about extending investing to a team over an individual. Best of luck with your idea. We look forward to seeing the results...
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