I’m having a bit of a dilemma.

I’m a web developer, and as a web developer, I’m part of an industry that is forever evolving. New tools and techniques are being created all the time, and if you don’t keep up with the latest industry developments, you face being left behind.

In addition to this: I’m a PC – and very proud of that fact. Microsoft’s Windows platform might not have been at the top of its game at all times (I’m looking at you Windows Vista and Windows 8), but I think Windows 7 is a fantastic operating system – I’ll be the first to admit that Windows 7 isn’t perfect, but I like it.

It’s a lot like your favourite hoodie: the design might be faded, the stitching around the hem might be starting to come loose, and there might be other hoodies with cool, slick and stylish designs on them, but your like your favorite one because it has molded to your body shape and fits you perfectly – which is exactly the case with me and Windows 7.

So?

My dilemma is that, in my effort to try and keep up to date with the latest tools and techniques being developed for the web industry, I’m going to have to jump ship and start using a Mac.

I’m no fan of the Mac.

Unlike my favourite Windows-7-hoodie, a Mac-hoodie would be too short on the waist, too long in the sleeves, and things would keep falling out of the pockets.

Anything I’m able to do on a PC I’m equally able to do on a Mac (and vice versa – but more on this in a moment), but I prefer doing it on the PC as it fits my way of working better. More and more, however, I’m seeing people within the web industry ignore the PC and focus on the Mac. Tools such as CodeKit and Hammer are Mac exclusives, and even tools which support both platforms such as GitHub, tend to focus on the Mac features first.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m able to achieve the same goals as all of these Mac-only tools via the combination of my PC and Debian development server – but it never just works - there is always something that I need to configure or fix. One could make the argument that I’m better off doing things the hard way, and that I’m learning more by manually configuring everything, but I’m not a software engineer - I’m a web developer, and as such, so I don’t care how the tools I use work, I just care that they do work.

This isn’t to say that Macs are fundamentally better than PCs (they’re not) or that PCs are better than Macs (equally not). It also doesn’t mean that the tools in question can’t exist on the PC (they can, if only someone would build them). It simply means that the developers of said tools, for whatever reason, are choosing to build them exclusively for the Mac, and as such, if I want to take advantage of them, I also have to use a Mac.

Once bitten, twice shy

Anyone that knows me knows that I embraced Apple once before when purchasing an iPad, which I later regretted. I still have the iPad in question, but it currently exists as nothing more than a music player, pumping funky tunes out of its speaker dock, as all its other functionality has been superseded by my Android phones and tablet.

I also have access to a Mac at work, but don’t use it for anything more than checking email or reading documentation, as everything else I need to do is completed using an old Windows 7 laptop which I brought into work on my second day of employment. I keep giving Apple the opportunity to impress me, but keep coming away disappointed.

So the point (and dilemma I’m facing) is that, if I should somehow find the £1,500 needed for a semi-decent Macbook, and decide to embrace the Apple once again, am I just going to end up regretting it?

As always, I welcome your comments below.

I originally purchased the domain danielhollands.co.uk back in November 2011 when I was working for Propeller. I’d heard on the news that someone famous had their name’s domain name cyber squatted, and had failed, legally, to take it back for themselves. (Whoever it was can’t have been that famous, however, as I don’t remember who they were.)

Although I highly doubted that anyone would want to cyber squat my name (other than, say, someone else named Daniel Hollands), for a fiver each year, I might as well get it just in case.

Although this isn’t the first time I’ve hosted something on that domain (for the past year or so it’s had a copy of my CV which used a third party template), but this is an important launch for me for two reason, first; the site’s code is all my own work, and second; all the aforementioned code is available for all to see on Bitbucket. (I did consider moving it to my GitHub account, but Bitbucket has served me well, so I figured, credit where credit is due.)

Anyway, I open to feedback, so please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below

Essentials

Bitbucket (Free)

I like GitHub. I use it to host my public repositories and I like what it has done for both Git (making it the de facto version control system) and the open source movement (made it easy for people across the world to collaborate on open source projects for free). But as a lone developer who currently manages 41 (and counting) private repos. across two accounts, it would cost me $100 per month to host them on GitHub.

BitBucket, on the other hand, since it added support for Git, does everything that GitHub does, but charges according  to number of users on each repo., and seeing as each repo gets 5 (or up to 8 if you refer people) users for free, I’d be throwing my money away if I didn’t use them.

Dropbox (Free)

At the time of writing my Dropbox account has 23 GBs of free storage, of which I’m using just under 80%. This is quite a bit more than the 2 GBs of free storage you start with, but if you know how, it’s quite possible to get this much (if not more) with relative ease.

Google Apps (Free)

Google Apps is a great way of having a Gmail account on your own domain name. Sure, it’s possible (via a series of email forwards, aliases, additional reply to settings, et al) to sort of do this with a regular Gmail account, but Google Apps is much more fluid, and provided you don’t set-up more than 10 mailboxes on your domain, it’s totally free. (I plan on writing a full review of Google Apps at some point in the future, so watch this space).

Basecamp (Budget package @ $20/month)

Since it’s recent rebuild, Basecamp has gone from strength to strength. I used to use Asana for my project management needs, which is free for up to 30 collaborative members, but Basecamp, which allows me unlimited collaborative members across ten active (and unlimited inactive) projects, just works better.

BE Broadband (Pro @ £28.89/month)

I think this is a very reasonable rate for what I get: 14 meg download speed, a static IP, unlimited downloads, and telephone line rental. I’m tempted to go for a fibre optic connection in my next flat, but I’m happy with this for now.

Hetzner (X2 Dedicated Server @ €29.00/month)

Up until around a year ago I was more than happy using JustHost. I had a 50% off discount code (50OFF), and paid two years in advance, meaning that hosting all my websites cost me less than £2 per month – but this was holding back my development. Since setting up my dedicated server (a local development server with the same set-up) I’ve learnt a lot about server management, Bash, Git, Apache, BIND, Samba, and so much more (even if I did get hacked in the process).

Backup script (Free)

Using a slightly modified version of a script created by Gina Trapani, both of my servers automatically create a backup, which is saved to my Dropbox account, at midnight every day. I mention this only as Chris pays $40 a month per site for for a backup solution called VaultPress.

GIT-FTP (Free)

In a similar vein to the backup script above, whereas Chris spends $15 a month to use Beanstalk to deploy his Git-based projects, on projects where I don’t have SSH access to the server, I use a simple Bash script written by René Moser.

Font Squirrel (Free)

If you’re looking for a custom font to use on a website you can’t go far wrong looking for it on Font Squirrel. Not only do they have over 800 (and counting) font families available, each of which is 100% free for commercial use, but they also provide all the tools you need to make them work. Move over Typekit, Font Squirrel got it covered.

Optional

Orange (Panther 26 @  £32.35/month)

Although not strictly needed for my job, my Android-powered mobile phone lets me keep connected on the move.

Conclusion

Unlike my previous post – which said that even though I was paid a fraction of his start-up costs, I still had all the same abilities as him – this post tells a slightly different story.

Like my previous post, I’ve listed various free alternatives to services that Chris pays for, but on a number of occasions, while the free alternative is OK, you get more for your money with Chris’s option.

For example, I’ve got 23 GBs of free storage on Dropbox, but it has cost me time and effort to amass that amount, which I did by testing beta editions of the software, linking my university account and around four years of referrals.

Also quite telling is what I don’t have on my list, such as the lack of CDN services – although It could be argued that none of my sites need it (I get nowhere near the levels of traffic that Chris gets) – or accounts/invoicing – I don’t have enough freelance clients to make this a necessity currently.

Anyway, all in all, just under £100 is leaving my account each month. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some more freelance clients in the near future, and this amount can go up as I pay for more services, but in the meantime, I think this is pretty reasonable.

Within one hour I’d received a reply from their deputy editor, Tom May, giving me the go ahead, within one week the article had been written and sent off for approval, and within one month, my work was on the news-stands (check the June 2012 edition of .net to see it for yourself).

As cool as it was to see my work published (and believe it, it is very cool), I was a little upset that they had edited it down as much as they had, and chosen to fill all the empty space they had created with a HUGE photo of myself (one of THREE locations they used my photo in).

Because of this, I decided that at some point in the future I would publish the entire article myself – and it appears that point in the future is today, so enjoy.

The Lone Developer

I’ve been dabbling in web development since around 1999. I started teaching myself in my spare time, and by around 2006, I felt I was good enough at this-whole web-development-malarkey that I would probably enjoy it as a career. Fast-forward three and a half years, and not only had I graduated from the University of Worcester with a degree in Computing/Web Development, but was just about to start my first professional web development gig, working as an intern for a local college in Evesham.

Although I was part of the marketing department, I was a lone developer. The people that I worked for didn’t have any real knowledge of the Web, making me the go-to guy for any and all Web-related questions. During my nine month tenure with the college, I built a site that not only achieved all the college’s goals, but one that I felt very proud of. I was clearly the best developer this side of sliced bread (or something like that).

It wasn’t until my next job, working as part of a team for a medium-sized Web development company in Rugby that I discovered that I maybe wasn’t the super-developer that I thought I was, and that maybe, some of the techniques I was employing were just a tad out of date.

For example, when I first started to learn PHP, version 4 was the latest and greatest. But in the years since then, version 5 had been released, changing PHP in some very fundamental ways, and I had failed to keep up to date with these changes. It is a similar story all across the Web, with HTML5 superseding XHTML, CSS animations taking over from JavaScript, the rise of mobile devices killing Flash and forcing us to cater for more than just desktop users, and the death of Internet Explorer 6 meaning that we can finally put our hacks away.

This is the curse of the lone developer – the constant challenge of staying up to date in an industry that is forever pushing forward.

Most lone developers tend to be jack-of-all-trades (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Apache, Design, Graphics, Usability, etc.), meaning they have various different technologies to keep up to date with, as opposed to a team’s dedicated JavaScript developer, who has the luxury of being able to focus on a single technology.

So with the Web industry growing, with more people choosing it as their career every day, how does the lone developer keep up to date, and avoid being replaced by someone younger, and powered by more up to date knowledge?

My first piece of advice is to become part of a community. Although I am no longer with the company in Rugby, and am, once again, a lone developer, working for a small company in Leamington Spa, I keep in touch with my old work colleagues. This small community of people, who meet from 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday, in the virtual realm of IRC, allow everyone there to benefit from shared knowledge, and can provide a sort of peer-review of everything you do. The community you belong to could be via a group on Facebook, a forum, or even a physical meet up once a month, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you use it to share knowledge and learn from one another.

• Stack Overflow has saved my life on more than one occasion. The question/answer format of this site makes it very for you to find solutions to your problems, as well as help others with theirs.
• GitHub seems to be the centre of the open source community at the moment, allowing remote members of a team easily share and contribute towards projects.

My second is to take full advantage of RSS. The Web is full of fantastic sites just begging to give you news and information on the latest developments in the industry, each of which publishes their latest articles via RSS. Sure, they no doubt also use Twitter and Facebook to promote these articles, but if you follow even a moderate number of people via these social networking sites, you have to be in the right place at the right time to see them, before they get flushed under the constant stream of information. RSS, on the other hand, lets you choose when to read it.

• WebAppers provide regular updates on the latest open source resources for web developers, and has had the predictive quality of featuring a useful resource, just as I need it.
• .net I couldn’t write an article for .net without telling each and every one of you to subscribe to their RSS feed.

This leads me to my final piece of advice, which is to always try and learn something new. Many of the aforementioned RSS feeds will include tutorials on just about anything you can imagine. By dedicating some time each week to working though these tutorials (which sometimes can be completed in no more than 30 minutes), you’ll be reinforcing your knowledgebase, and even if you don’t see any immediate need for what you’re learning, that isn’t to say that you will never need it.

• Codrops I’m always amazed at the quality of the tutorials provided by codrops, they’re always informative, and the result of the tutorial always looks stunning.
• Nettuts provides tutorials on just about every aspect of web development, each one easy to understand and follow.

It is hard work being a lone developer, and I admit that what I’m suggesting above probably sounds like I’m trying to make your life harder, but it is human nature to want to make things easier, and by learning the latest way of doing something, you’ll probably find that you’re actually making your life that much easier.

But what if you’re not working on an open source project? Sure, you can buy access to private repositories from GitHub - but if you have a team of five or less, I’m here to tell you to put your wallet away.

Bitbucket for teh win

Allow me to introduce you to Bitbucket, which started life as Mercurial’s answer to GitHub, and served as a hub for the Mercurial community. I used the Bitbucket service, for a time, during my Mercurial days at Propeller, as they offered private repositories for free.

I remember at the time that this caused me much dilemma, as I knew the de-facto industry standard was becoming Git, and was keen on switching away from Mercurial for this reason, but could not afford GitHub.

This all changed on the 3rd October 2011 when Bitbucket announced support for Git.

Is it any good?

Bitbucket works in much the same way as GitHub does, and so far as I can tell, supports mostly all the same features. For example, each repository supports a wiki and issue tracking system, full history of past commits, support for pull requests, integration with a large number of services, and proably a whole ton of other git-based goodies that I’ve not even begun to explore.

They also support submodules hosted at in other locations (such as GitHub), a feature that I take full advantage of on almost all of my own projects (even WordPress ones), so you don’t need to worry about losing this feature.

Keen on taking business from their rivals, BitBucket also supports the ability to import repositories directory from GitHub, Google Code, Subversion, et al. meaning that switching to BitBucket is an easy process.

(And no, as my old work colleague Sheepy asked me, it doesn’t do anything funny like ‘covert the repositories into mercurial then back into git’.)

Value for money

Bitbucket makes its money by charging for the maximum number of people that can access each repository, rather than on the number of repositories you own. This means, for example, if you’re in a small web design firm with a large throughput, (such as Ghost Design) it could work out more cost effective than the competition, without any loss of functionality.

So, If you’re not yet using any form of remote repository for your private projects, then give Bitbucket a go., Whereas if you’re already using GitHub, a couple of quick sums will tell you if you’re better off with BitBucket, and with no more than a few minutes importing your existing repositories, you’ll be up and running before you know it.

Full discolsure

I did win a t-shirt from Bitbucket as part of their spooning promotion, but it takes a lot more than a free t-shirt to buy me. I’ve posted this message because I believe that Bitbucket offer a good service, and I want to give credit where credit is due.