The Setup: I was recently hired to help with the front-end of an already in development web application. Up to that point when I was brought on, the project had been solely developed by my boss, who is a back-end guy and needed help getting everything running and looking like the development style guide he was given. I am just fresh out of school, and my boss does not seem to have a lot of experience developing as part of a team. The way we have been doing things in order to get the work that I do merged with the main project is pretty insane. He had been using inline styles on just about everything, so I have been making style sheet tweaks and then going through the files and adding classes to things and removing inline styles from most places. Usually at the end of the week, I will take the stylesheet and any font, image, svg, or other misc files I have been working on, zip up the Alpha Anywhere files I have been working on from within Alpha, putting them on a shared network drive with a README file for him with instructions for where to put stuff, and then having him go through all that to merge my work into the current build on his machine. I have been trying to get us to migrate to a better way to of doing thing but we are on such a time crunch to get this done that he has wanted to wait until this project is over. But doing things this way obviously takes up so much time that it is absolutely worth switching to a proper method if I can create a solid and actionable plan to do so.
The other problem is this: When my boss takes the most recent build and zips it up within Alpha and then gives it to me to unzip and use, things in the application will be immediately broken as soon as I open the workspace on my machine, before I do anything to it. So thing will look good and as designed on his machine, all the files will be zipped up (and we have tried a couple different things when zipping it up to try to fix this) and then on my machine things like the buttons will be broken and unstyled on the nav, the size and layout of things will be off, the footer will go from black to white. Weird stuff. It is obviously incredibly difficult to do my work of styling things when I am given a build that looks different on my machine than on the boss' where it will be integrated. We so far have not figured out why exactly things are different, but I have suggested that we need to get rid of as many variables as we can by ensuring we are on the same Operating System (he is on Win 7 and I'm on 10), version of Alpha (he hasn't updated in a long time on his machine), making sure project file directory structure is identical, etc, but none of that has been done yet.
So my questions would be this:
Thanks so much to anyone who can help me with this. My integration this past Friday went really badly and it really made clear to me that something needs to change or this problem is going to keep me from being able to do my job effectively. I appreciate it.
The other problem is this: When my boss takes the most recent build and zips it up within Alpha and then gives it to me to unzip and use, things in the application will be immediately broken as soon as I open the workspace on my machine, before I do anything to it. So thing will look good and as designed on his machine, all the files will be zipped up (and we have tried a couple different things when zipping it up to try to fix this) and then on my machine things like the buttons will be broken and unstyled on the nav, the size and layout of things will be off, the footer will go from black to white. Weird stuff. It is obviously incredibly difficult to do my work of styling things when I am given a build that looks different on my machine than on the boss' where it will be integrated. We so far have not figured out why exactly things are different, but I have suggested that we need to get rid of as many variables as we can by ensuring we are on the same Operating System (he is on Win 7 and I'm on 10), version of Alpha (he hasn't updated in a long time on his machine), making sure project file directory structure is identical, etc, but none of that has been done yet.
So my questions would be this:
- What is the best method of version control for small teams developing web applications in Alpha Anywhere? What are most people doing? Are people just using Git?
- Similarly to above, what is the best practice for pushing merges of two locally edited versions of the project? What are other small teams doing?
- Lastly, what amount of syncing up should be necessary for the machines of small dev teams? What could be causing my weird problem with things looking different after exporting to another machine? Should we be ensuring we are on the same software version? OS? Something else I'm not thinking of?
Thanks so much to anyone who can help me with this. My integration this past Friday went really badly and it really made clear to me that something needs to change or this problem is going to keep me from being able to do my job effectively. I appreciate it.
Comment