Anyone can criticize a website for not having a nice enough design or layout or having a confusing UI. Maybe there’s not enough or too much whitespace on a site, maybe the colors suck, or maybe the business model is stupid. For the most part, this is what the general public will see and judge a company’s website, and often the company itself, on. For the most part, it doesn’t matter to people what language or development environment was used to build the web application; all that matters is that it works the way it should. No one except IT / development really cares about what is underneath the hood of these applications.
As a developer myself though, I have a curiousity that exceeds most others’ desires to know how these applications were build. I want to know what is underneath the hood and how good the developers themselves are. In the past, it was nearly impossible for outsiders like me to look at the underbellies of these applications to gauge the skills of those to made them. However, with the past few years, application code in the form of JavaScript has been pushed to the client an amazing rate and new tools have surfaced that make it easier to dig into this code.
This code is where the crux of my issues with a number of companies lies. You’d think that with the massive amounts of money that these “Web 2.0″ companies have been raising lately that someone there would ensure that the code that is pushed to the client is both secure and efficient. In my opinion, security hasn’t changed all that much. All JavaScript / AJAX forces a developer to do is just take more time to ensure that the way he would have done things otherwise was the right way to do things. AJAX just reduces some of the guesswork that a hacker / cracker / whatever would have had to put in to break the app the way they wany. On the other hand, the efficiency of that code is something new that web developers must learn and get used to.
My entire family is a family of engineers. We’re obsessed with efficiency, optimizations, and often perfection. I might actually be the worst of them all, as I’m always trying to make things better — just ask my wife, as it drives her crazy. Therefore, I’m going to attempt to focus my quest to make things better on a number of very popular websites that I have already singled out. You’ll see this come to fruition in a number of posts of posts over the next few weeks. After that, I’m not sure which direction I’ll end up taking with this blog.
However before I can tell other companies what they are doing wrong and how I think they can do things better, I’ll have to share my own practices that I use on a daily basis to deliver what I feel is the best code possible with the constraint of time over my head. You’ll find all of this in my next post.
