The proliferation of Web technologies has been much on my mind lately. Last week, I talked about the continuum of Web development tools, ranging from traditional browser-based technologies all the way to applications deployed as binary executables. The interesting thing is that all of these tools are designed to achieve similar goals. So which do you use?

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If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

One thing that has helped me maintain satisfaction and success in this profession is quite simple. Always make sure you are having fun. Don't get caught up in meaningless chases to be better than person X. If you can acknowledge that you will never know it all, and that there is always someone who knows more than you do, you open yourself up to chart your own course for how you navigate your career path. Making decisions that are actually right for you, not because you "think" you need to do it. When I look back to when I first started to right now, there is not a single point along the way where I can say that I was not having an absolute blast doing what I was doing. Even when I was not using agile methodologies, or big into unit testing, I put a high priority on having fun and exercising the creative nature of the work that we do!! Keep it fun, and the rest will follow. For the Christian developers out there you may also appreciate these words from the bible, that I read a looooong time ago and have always kept close to my heart:

Source: How Did I Get Started In Software Development? By Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo

I've paid for the rent and the furnishings and the menus and the staff and the insurance... is this plate of food worthy of what went before it?

I've flown across the country to visit this museum--a building that cost more than a billion dollars to create and fill and maintain. Is my attention focused enough?

By Seth Godin Read More

• Composite key
• Natural key
• Surrogate key

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, but by and large I always wind up going with the last option.

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The current sIFR release is version 2.0.5. sIFR is released to the world as open source, under the GNU Lesser General Public License (see human-readable summary at Creative Commons), so anyone can use it free of charge.

Put simply, sIFR allows website headings, pull-quotes and other elements to be styled in whatever font the designer chooses - be that Foundry Monoline, Gill Sans, Impact, Frutiger or any other font - without the user having it installed on their machine.

sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader's browser will automatically display traditional CSS based styling - the user won't know the difference.

Take a look at the examples page to see some examples of sIFR in action.

See also Mike's original article on sIFR: Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.

Why Give Their Money Back?

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Our culture certainly encourages people to be "first." In school, the emphasis ranges from who raises a hand first in class to who graduates with the highest grade-point average. The valedictorian - first in the class - gets lots of honors, but the salutatorian - second in the class - has to make the speech (phooey!).

Sports competitions also honor the "winner," and books on problem solving and business often borrow this metaphor - emphasizing finding the "winning" idea before anybody else. But most problem-solving areas of life are not, in fact, like sports. It's not having the idea that matters, it's what you do with the idea that counts.

And, in fact, ideas don't count that much in sports, either. Anyone can have the idea, "Hit a home run now and win the game," but there's a lot more to hitting home runs than simply having the idea. To have a fair chance of hitting a home run, you have to practice, practice, and practice. As in most of life, the key issue is not who is there first with the idea; the key issue is how you develop the idea once you have it. It's not your ideas alone that win, but ideas plus capability and the will to develop your ideas.

If you think having ideas first is the issue, consider this. Every year, tens of thousands of individuals start businesses based on being the first with a "new" idea. If that was all it took to be wildly successful, many of these firms would quickly displace all of the giant firms and become giants themselves, every year! Yes, we all know stories of small firms that had a better idea and indeed succeeded at becoming giants, but most of the time, the giants persist and the midgets fall humbly by the wayside.

Giant companies survive the onslaught of little start-ups with one of two strategies:
1. Exploring many parallel ideas and developing the few good ones.
2. Letting others do most of the searching for ideas, then developing the few good ones.

What can the individual professional learn from these strategies?

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Tip #2 - How people link to you really does matter