[thelist] CF: Advanced? How do you know?

[Marc Garrett]

Hi Frank,

I'm not sure how I would tell who is an "advanced" CF programmer -- that
might depend on the particular project and skillset. But when I'm looking to
contract with a "competent" CF developer here's what I look for in their
code:

- a methodology. I don't really care what it is, and I don't use Fusebox,
but I like to see that someone uses internally consistent variable naming
conventions. Also, they should have a standard way of organizing and naming
their files. I shouldn't have to know anything about their app to find their
query files, for example;
- someone who knows when to let the database do the heavy lifting instead of
the CF code. A newbie will usually pack all of the database work into the CF
code and the app will be much slower;
- error handling: consistent use of cftry/cfcatch so end users aren't
exposed to ugly code or errors messages;
- proper use of cfswitch/cfcase instead of a string of deeply nested and
confusing cfifs;
- no evaluate() abuse!
- someone who understands client-server databases. My database of choice is
SQL Server, so I would want to make sure the person knew how to use views
and stored procedures to show and protect their data, instead of handling
everything in cfquery;
- knowledge of cfqueryparam for data integrity;
- knowledge of UDFs, which means competence with cfscript;
- proper locking;
- at least some knowledge of RegEx. I constantly struggle with RegEx myself,
but at a minimum, a CF developer should know how to strip malicious code out
of a form submission.

I'm sure somebody could do all those things and still be a crummy coder, but
if they use the above practices they've demonstrated that they at least care
about data integrity and error handling. Most newbies don't give much
thought to those issues. Also, I tend to deal with small sites and
intranets, so I didn't mention anything about clustering and failover. If
you work on heavy traffic sites, I suppose you'd have to know about that too
before you could be considered competent.

Regards,

Marc Garrett
since1968.com
Singapore

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank" <framar at interlog.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 8:32 AM
Subject: [thelist] CF: Advanced? How do you know?


>
> If you were looking for a developer to partner with, or contract out to,
> what are the benchmarks that you would use to determine whether or not his
> is advanced? What are some of the questions you would ask him or her
> (rather than giving a test. Tests to prove your mettle, but tests aren't
> something you give until you're pretty convinced that this person might
> indeed be advance).
>
>