Binary Code

I love this rant: Read Giles Coren’s letter to Times subs.

That’s passion for your work!

As a collective industry we’ve been building web apps for about fifteen years now. In many ways we’ve greatly improved our development processes, our tools, our methodologies and our expectations. Today we whip out Rails apps in days that would have taken months before; single developers are producing entire commercial sites where once a team would’ve been required.

But alas not all is golden in this day and age. Time and time again I come across development practices and code that would not have been out of place in 1995, and that is not a compliment (and incidentally, these practices and code would have been bad then too, we web developers were just too divorced from the comp-sci folks to know it at the time).

Fortunately experience and hindsight can now provide us with rough guidelines against which we might develop our own apps. In the spirit of fifteen years of web development advancement I present to you “You’re Doing it Wrong If”.

You’re doing it wrong if:

• You’re not building atop an open-source framework
• You’re writing your own framework upon which to build
• You’re not using a database abstraction layer
• You’re writing your own database abstraction layer
• You believe you can write it faster or better or more efficiently than any available library
• You have more than one developer on your project and no written coding style guidelines
• Your bug tracker serves as your functional scope or your development roadmap
• You aren’t using source control
• You comment the what but not the why
• You tend to pass properties instead of instances to functions
• Your “deployment procedure” involves any combination of FTP and/or drag n’ drop
• You write code in a manner that cannot be unit tested
• Your primary method of code reuse is copy/paste
• You don’t read any development blogs focused on your primary and secondary languages or technologies
• You haven’t been to a conference or birds-of-a-feather meeting in the past year
• The only code you read at work is your own
• You worry that some day someone else will read your code and know it was written by you

and finally

• You’re doing it wrong if you aren’t learning every day

Only truly terrible places are victims of all of the above, however no one is immune. The more hurried we are, the more stressed we are, the more of a monoculture we work in, the more likely we are to become affected by these ailments.

(It goes without saying that these are general rules of thumb, applying ye olde “90/10″ rule and you, of course, are part of the 10. However for the sake of everyone else I urge you to consider Bruce Schneier’s famous words: “anyone who creates his own security protocol is either a genius or a fool”. The odds are not in your favour).

Update: Changed “ORM” to “database abstraction layer”.

Microsoft is sponsoring the Apache foundation and I am indeed impressed:

Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership.

Now one could take the cynical approach that it is yet more lip service from Microsoft about being “open” without actually being open (and really, a hundred grand is pocket change to MS) but I like to think this could be the start of something good. Especially given this statement:

Ramji, who made the announcements at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Friday, promised “a lot more” PHP patches in the coming months now Microsoft had established processes he said clarified how employees can contribute to open source.
…
The decision to work on PHP fits with the overall strategy of improving the language’s interoperability with Windows and stemming the loss of PHP application deployments to Linux. LGPL allows code to be used with proprietary programs - such as SQL Server - unlike its GPL cousin.

(The word from the Apache Foundation itself.)

I had no idea Microsoft was even interested in PHP much less in a position to contribute patches. A quick googling suggests that this is not a new development so I suppose my surprise is a function of not paying much attention to web development on the Windows platform.

Regardless, PHP is the dominant web language and anything (and anyone) who helps improve PHP, regardless of platform, helps us all.

PHP, IronRuby… Microsoft, I feel like I hardly know you.

User interface design is not about dumbing things down for the poor stupid user.

We software developers, understanding the software as we do, find it easy to look down upon those who lack our understanding.

This is wrong.
- These things I believe.

A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of getting DreamBank ready for launch I was feeling like I needed a break. Of course that meant “what can I develop in Rails over a single weekend?” See, I had an idea for an application that would fulfill a need we had at DreamBank: how to manage incoming applicants and resumes against available job positions and I was pretty sure it would go.

My one-weekend project became a two weekend project and a bunch more time was shoe-horned in here and there for bug fixes and improvements until it was finally usable. And then we really got serious about the other launch and development got forgotten; it was released and functional and - dare I say it - even useful but neglected.

I now present to you “Applican“, a Rails-based resume/applicant/job tracker designed (as much as it has been) as an internal tool for small & medium-sized companies. For more details see the proto-documentation here.

I consider the current release to be about v0.4: it works, it’s useful, it undoubtedly has bugs, they’re may not be critical, there’s definitely functionality to be added. It’s free, it’s open-sourced, it’s available on Github and it require Rails 2.1.

(Apologies to Robert Rodriguez for stealing and bastardizing one of the best lines in cinema history).

For the better part of the last six months I’ve been working at a small, brand-new start-up helping to develop a new kind of socially-conscious gifting website. This week we launched! I present to you: DreamBank.

DreamBank merges gift-giving, social networking and charitable contributions into one place to provide a means for people to get what they want while also helping others get what they need.

We’re pretty proud of this endeavour and I am very much looking forward to continuing to develop and improve the site for all our users. I hope you enjoy it too!

(And if you’re feeling particularly magnanimous, here’s my dream )

High-order languages will be the next web frameworks: everyone will think they know how to write their own.

(In the dystopian version of this future: everyone tries.)

Oh happy day, Pimp My Code is back: Pimp My Code, Part 15: The Greatest Bug of All in which Wil tackles his own white whale of a problem.

I’m not sure if PMC installments are a product of Wil going back on the meds or off the meds and I don’t care; you sure can’t beat technical writing like this:

Hmm. Now you think. Think think think. I think better if I distract myself from the problem and let my hind-brain take over. So I went and played Assassin’s Creed, and murdered some fools who had waged war on their fellow man, or made the mistake of calling me peasant, or gotten in my way, or looked funny, or stood around yelling too much about how Salem Ali is a strong man. Honestly, once you start stabbing people in the neck it’s hard to stop.

And it contains helpful life-lessons and morals and wisdom-laden guidance to boot. PMC has made my morning - thanks Wil!

I had to laugh this morning when I woke up and starting reading about Adobe’s new Acrobat 9. Adobe seems hell-bent on taking a great format (PDF) and epitomizing the worst of all things bloatware with it.

On Windows:

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

On Mac OS:

System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, G4 or later (including Intel), 128MB RAM, 405MB hard disk space and Safari 2.0.4 or later.

One fifth of a gig and half a gig, respectively. Are you serious?

I urge you to forget Acrobat ever existed, and on the Mac this is easy to do. Use Preview (a svelte 64.2 MB) to read your PDFs and us the Print command to produce them. Use Safari to browse, it renders PDFs natively without the need for Adobe’s Acrobat plugin.

Just say “No” to Adobe’s “your computer is our garbage dump” approach to software.

Update Gus Mueller decomposes the Acrobat 9 installer and Mark Pilgrim imagines an Acrobat-induced dystopia.