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shakedown

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I agree. I started contracting recently. At first I imagined getting 7-8 hours of billable work in every day. The reality is I've been able to do 4 - 5 hours of billable work every day before feeling burnt out and a bit crazy.

To clarify, by 'big' i meant not just in size, but in number of highish profile clients.

Towards the end of me being there, they added a more senior developer/manager to the Romanian team -- his code was much better (i.e. not dreamweaver generated HTML/CSS) and was easier to communicate with, but still the code quality from the others on the team was very unmaintainable.

I apologize if it seemed as if I was generalizing the entire country of Romania's programming abilities -- definitely not what I intended. If all the developers were as good as the senior developer added on later, I'm sure it would have went much better.

My main point remains the same though, and I think is one that we can both agree on - that hiring inexpensive labor with only focusing on the front end user experience, without any respect or idea of how well the back end is being constructed is a bad idea. I'm sure outsourcing can work, but only with careful attention to the behind the scenes backend code quality, to ensure the project is not being held together by duct tape.

A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site.

The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code.

If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.

Shell_plus is just what I was looking for. Shell driven coding really speeds up my development, and this helps a lot by relieving me of copying and pasting many imports every time I run a new shell.

Definitely a far cry from Basecamp's intuitive design. Although, this may evolve into something worthwhile in it's own respect, as ActiveState's Komodo Edit is my editor of choice: it's fast, free, extensible and open source. In it's current state 'ActiveState Workspace' doesn't seem like much, but I'm interested to see how it evolves.