>>>For me personally I rather pay a reasonable amount of money for a tool/platform/service and get a responsible infrastructure that goes with it and supports it than picking up small pieces and piecing it all together by myself with trial and error
>
>Agreed.
>I started doing web development last year. Someone directed me at some free HTML editors and after gnashing my teeth for a few days I happily purchased Dreamweaver, which was worth every buck.
>Adobe does a great job with Dreamweaver and they are entitled to make a reasonable profit for it.
>
>On the other hand, one of my hobbies is digital photography, and recently when I needed some new editing software someone steered me to Gimp, a free open source photo editing platform.
>It's not as slick or polished as Photoshop, etc, but it does everything I need and I'm not constantly bombarded with upgrade or renewal reminders.
>Some excellent programmers somewhere did a great job with it and I'm thankful to them.
>
>So in once case I pay and in the other I don't.
>
>When I first came into the business, when discussing creative output, we used to say that "an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite period of time will eventually produce all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets."
>With today's tools, you'd have to amend that to say that a few good programmers sitting at a few good machines for a few weeks can produce just about anything they want to produce.
>
>That means that the days of software monopolies are over and that anyone who wants to make money selling software has to be ready to do what Adobe does - do it better than the free stuff does it.

Dreamweaver is great! In fact I have been reading the Missing Manuals book about it this weekend (recommended). It's a beautiful developer tool.

The only downside is the guy I work with, my alleged mentor, wants to do everything the way it was done 10 or 15 years ago when he first learned web development. Learn how to do something one way and then do it that way the rest of your life, one of those guys. We are still using classic ASP, so called. The code is full of things that were officially deprecated by the W3C 10 years ago, HTML tags like fonts and other things that are supposed to be done in CSS now. I don't even bring up CSS3 and HTML5 for fear of setting his head on fire. I don't think he even uses Dreamweaver. If he can open the code in one big Notepad file he is as happy as a pig in slop.

Oh, I'm rolling now. It's good for me to get this out of my system. Tomorrow morning I will be there at work and suck it up for another day. But lord, it's not easy. The way I look at it is penance for my mistakes the past few years. You screw up, this is what you wind up doing to stay solvent.

There was an interesting discussion my second day or so with Dismas (not his real name) and our mutual boss. I said I don't seem to see a version control program on my machine and asked if we have one. Dismas said no, he's never seen the point. He said he has way too much work to have time for checking files in and out. He really said that.

The company internet is locked up tighter than a nun. In the absence of a version control program I wanted to download a source comparison program so I could do it manually. Dismas jumped on me with both feet, saying you shouldn't even use the word "download" in an email, emails are monitored and it's a serious firing offense.

In my second week, with my dad dying, we had another firestorm over a trivial technical minor point. He said darkly that I was in my 90 day probationary period. I don't even report to him, we have the same boss, but I have no doubt he could take me out if he decides to.

Some days at work I really feel like I am in hell. I am doing everything I can to make this work, doing the next right thing and not doing the next wrong thing, and it's still hell.