I’ve recently written about CoffeeScript (more on that soon), and have been using it exclusively on a Sencha Touch application I’ve been working on. I’ve been using SASS on the same project, and both languages are lovely to work with. CoffeeScript, in particular, strikes me as the way JavaScript wants to be: it’s as though the language itself has been refactored.

But the real star of this story is neither CoffeeScript, nor SASS. The star—which I will introduce circuitously—is most notable when absent. At FreeAgent, I don’t use CoffeeScript, despite thinking it the most wonderful thing since discovering git autocompletions. Poor Robbie still hand-codes all our CSS (yes, even the amazing gradients you’ll see when the redesign hits), despite being desperate to use some SASS macros to tidy all that up for a much more declarative experience.

Personal project? I’m all over CoffeeScript and SASS like a cheap suit. Actual day job? Don’t touch it.

Why? Politics? Processing power? Reluctance to learn new stuff? If you’ve met any of the FreeAgent team, or seen the kind of kit we develop on, you’re laughing at all of these suggestions.

Simple: the personal project is on Rails 3.1. FreeAgent isn’t, yet.

Rails 3.1 has an amazing asset pipeline system that means you write your JavaScript and CSS using any language you like, with CoffeeScript and SASS being the defaults, and Rails automatically does the compilation steps before rendering the page. Write CoffeeScript, reload page, done.

As soon as you move outside a framework that does that for you, using any of these timesaving technologies requires you to invent a workflow upfront. Do you use Compass? Run a compiler from the commandline? Set watches on key-files? Keep your source out of the public tree?

These things are tricky enough for developers, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to get CoffeeScript compiling on Windows, but when it’s time for a designer to dabble with SASS, and they’ve suddenly got to manage dependency lists, console input and source-compile relationships, the barrier is too high. Hell, engineers outnumber the designers five to one at FreeAgent, and we haven’t got around to using Sprockets to bring the asset pipeline to Rails 3 yet.

So, am I surprised that the uptake on these new technologies is low? No, not at all. Do I think they’re overhyped? Also, no, not at all. I think that JavaScript’s future looks a lot like CoffeeScript’s present: after all, there’s nothing stopping browsers from running CoffeeScript directly, and the same is true of LESS or SASS. At that point, the skills you pick up now from dabbling are going to be invaluable.

I think that Rails’s role in all of this is interesting, too. I’m biased, of course, but it does seem that Rails has proved to be a weathervane in the last 5 or 6 years, promoting the good path of RESTful, Test Driven development by making those things so accessible that you feel stupid not using them. That thinking has spread to other languages and frameworks, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to predict the same things happening with CoffeeScript and SASS, now that they’re the defaults in Rails going forward.

Regardless, we’re all getting back to the stage where maintainability is far, far more important than raw development speed, and that’s where all of these technologies shine. So adoption is slow just now, and may remain so, but getting in early will put you well ahead of the competition by the time the workflows have stabilised.

Besides, both CoffeeScript and SASS put a lot of the fun back into this whole racket, and the fun technologies always win eventually.

More than any year since 2000, this has been a year of intense growth for me, both personally and professionally. Its end brings with it a shift in what I’m doing with my life, and 2010 brings with it two big steps that frankly scare the shit out of me, but in the best possible way.

And we’re still only in the first week of January.

So, big things. Those things have names.

Fresh Monkey

I’m a web construction worker. As Jough Dempsey said recently, “I make the Internet. Not all of it.” I’ve been doing that in various ways since 1998, and it’s still fun. I still can’t imagine doing anything else.

A lot of projects that I’m proud of made it out the door this year. Has 2009 been my most successful year? I don’t know how I’d measure that. Financially, the year ain’t over yet, and there’s still 4 or 5 projects that should ship within the month, so let’s reserve judgement on that for now.

For me, though, it’s the year I’m happiest with since my son was born, and that’s worth something.

A big contributing factor to that was managing to haul my lazy, self employed ass out of the dressing gown and into a proper office. Those of you who have visited us at cmdcentral may dispute the use of “proper”, but hey, it’s not a box room in my flat, which means I can leave work at work and “go home” at the end of the day.

Also helping along my mental health had been my move away from using a combination of Blinksale and Billings for invoicing. FreeAgent hasn’t saved my life yet (more on that in a moment), but it certainly meant I stopped waking up in a cold sweat wondering when the money was going to run out, and that’s a good thing when you’re self employed.

So what’s next for Fresh Monkey? Big things. We just went limited, and Anisa’s stepping in as project manager and co-director. Frankly, there’s too much work for just me any more, and I’d rather bring in more people than hand the work away to dreamweaver pilots, so watch this space. If you’re interested in knowing what I’ve got in mind, you should drop me a line.

So that’s big. What else?

FreeAgent

I’m not sure there are enough superlatives. Where else do you see support tickets like this one? Seriously, if you’re self employed, go and check it out. Even better, go and try it out using my kickback code and get yourself 10% off for life!

If you’re at all like me, you’re going to put off moving your accounts system over to them. You spent a long time setting up those spreadsheets, and they’re working just the way you like them. Why abandon that?

If rolling year-in-progress tax calculations, bank statement uploads and automatic invoice reconciliation, automated overdue reminders, recurring invoices, estimates and basic project management functionality doesn’t persuade you to at least try it out, how about this: I don’t know a single convert who has moved back.

Since day one, Ed, Roan and co have been obsessed with making an app that people like me want to use, and it shows.

Of course, there’s always room for improvement, and a quick glance at their Get Satisfaction community shows there’s no shortage of suggestions and requests from their rabidly enthusiastic users. So what’s a growing company to do?

Keep growing, seems to be their answer. They’ve got a new developer starting tomorrow, someone who I’m sure is going to be as fanatical about building a fantastic app as they are already, and will hopefully let them expand at an ever increasing rate.

I’ve been pestering them to let me help out for ages, as it’s been clear they needed and wanted more hands on the wheel, but they were adamant that they wanted to make a permanent hire, to have a senior developer on board 9-5, someone who would be in a position to really make a difference.

So when they said they wanted that developer to be me, I did what all gibbering fanboys do: I cried, and asked when they wanted me to start.

They said “How about the 6th of January?”.

Then they said “Oh, and if you want to keep your Fresh Monkey stuff running too, we don’t have a problem with that. Just try and get some sleep once in a while”.

Then I cried some more. Me, a respectable salaryman. Who’d have thought?

2010

So 2009 was awesome. Let’s look at the list for 2010:

• Working for a company I respect, on a product I love
• Growing a business I’m passionate about, working with more people I’m in awe of

And let’s not forget all the shiny new toys.

Welcome to 2010. It’s looking like a fun one.

2000: drank a lot of beer. A lot.

2001: graduated from Glasgow University.

2002: moved to Edinburgh.

2003: got engaged.

2004: got married.

2005: drank a lot of beer. A lot.

2006: became a dad.

2007: started to get the hang of this self employment thing.

2008: avoided moving house.

2009: took self employment out of the bedroom and into the office.

2010: to be continued…

I’m not sure I’ve ever known my gut to be wrong. In the past seven years, whenever anything has gone wrong, I can look back at a comment made to a friend or colleague saying, in effect, “I have a bad feeling about this”.

And I’m not just a scattergun pessimist. I know when I’m naysaying for the sake of it, and that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about that moment when you walk into the first client meeting, and something about the client, or the project, or the atmosphere in the room creeps you out. Or the way you find yourself sitting, uncomfortable, fidgety, looking for an excuse to get out, to leave, or to kill the meeting dead as fast as possible so you can get your team in a room and say “guys, really? We think this has an end?”

We’ve all had those moments, but we ignore them. “Be professional”, we tell ourselves, and then what do we do? We throw professionalism out the window and ignore what it is we’re selling in the first place: our skills and talents.

My gut knows a lot. It can pick up a lot of undercurrents and misgivings, a lot of warning signals that I’m too polite to admit to. And you know what, in a lot of cases, those misgivings aren’t about the client, they’re about me. My gut isn’t saying “this is a bad situation”, it’s saying “this isn’t a good fit”. It’s warning me about overpromising myself, or about taking on more than I can handle.

And in every one of those cases, it’s been right.

These cases aren’t just about not being “good enough”, either. Most of the time, it’s much more subtle: my gut most often warns me when a client is outwardly asking me to do one job, but implicitly requires me to do another job, which is far from my pool of talents.

Abstract sucks, let’s get concrete with a simple example:

Client asks me to produce a shopping cart, my mind applies itself, examines the technical issues, and it seems simple enough to handle. No big deal. Complex, yes, but doable, technically. Still, my gut is nagging at me, telling me something’s wrong.

What’s wrong? I’m up to the project, I’ve built similar apps before, why is this one tripping my early warning system?

Turns out the client didn’t really understand WHY they wanted the cart they asked for, and that, really, their business model isn’t really up to online sales. Suddenly, I’m a sales and business development advisor, and friends, I suck at sales and business development. The client’s getting frustrated at my lack of “web development” talent (remember, they don’t actually realise they’re asking me to do the wrong job), and I’m getting frustrated that they keep changing spec.

Looking at that initial meeting, I can see all the assumptions being made on both sides of the table, and my gut was well aware of them.

Further down the line, I end up backing out of the project, scars on all sides, and everyone’s wondering what went wrong.

What went wrong? I ignored my gut.

You do that at your peril.