Binary Code

Today’s my birthday and, as is inevitable with all birthdays, people ask “what would you like?” This year I’d like something a little different.

Since January I’ve been working with a group of fantastic people to help create DreamBank, a web site who’s goal – and our hope – is to alter, for the better, the way in which we give each other gifts. DreamBank is designed to allow anyone to post their goals, or their needs, or their wants in a way that allows their friends, their family, and everyone else to help them achieve their objectives. No more mis-sized socks, no more unwanted DVDs, no more soon-to-be-lost gift cards. Just a goal and the means.

For my birthday I’d really like if you’d head over to DreamBank, check out the work we’ve been doing, read about the philosophy, sign up, create a dream and give it a try.

http://www.dreambank.org

Many thanks to you, on my birthday.
Chris

I fully support this metric: A New Code Metric : Destroyed Lines Of Code (DLOC). I suspect that deleting extraneous lines of code is often far, far more enjoyable than actually writing that code in the first place.

We all know that the first dump of code for any feature of any notable size (I’d argue somewhere above six lines of code or so) is almost never perfect. Never as concise as it could be, never as elegant. At least, that’s the case for my code anyhow. At the moment of creation this dross is offset by the acute focus of the mind that created it, juggled it, pure clarity incarnate. But as time passes and the mind drifts further and further from that moment of creation the inelegance of the code percolates to the surface while the clarity clouds and fades until eventually, one fateful day, the mind returns to that block of code and instead of resuming the juggling, it gasps a “Wtf was I doing here? And why did I do it like that?” and then “Six lines? More like three lines jackass – sha-zam!”

And in deleting and refactoring some beauty is regained, and the inelegance to clarity ratio decreases and the code is better, for some personal measure of “better”.

And in that the mind has just undertaken constructive destructive refactoring. And it is good.

In which Jason tears apart and then rebuilds Axe’s rather clichéd ad, and in the process makes it funny instead of just dumb: When Copywriters Try To Program.

Awesome.

Congrats to Colin Oberst who’s “Canadian Gold” is now the new Hockey Night in Canada theme song (though the original will always be Canada’s second national anthem I suspect).

And congrats to the Mudmen who play the bagpipes on “Canadian Gold”. Good stuff indeed.

Now if I were the CBC, I’d re-record it with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Mudmen. It sounds to me like it needs to sound so much bigger!

(The original can be found here. It still brings a tear to my eye).

The dearth of quality resumes has become a pretty common theme amongst bloggers in positions of hiring authority. And every post seems to be driven by how amazingly poorly written most resumes and cover letters actually are. Robert Scoble is the latest to weigh in with some quality advice and I’m going to throw my own out as well (since we’re hiring at DreamBank for a PHP developer):

1. Google for advice on how to submit a resume before submitting resumes. Start with Scoble, look for Rands, and so-forth. Some extremely smart, influential people are trying to tell tyou how to game the system they control – pay attention to them.
2. Submit in the manner the job description states, not via your path of least resistance. For instance I want resumes as PDFs. Not Powerpoint, not raw email, and never, ever a Word doc. I state that in every job description I write and maybe 50% of people follow through with it.
3. Don’t apply for jobs you’re not qualified for. I wrote my own software to keep track of and score every resume I receive and it works well. You don’t want to apply for a position you’re not a fit for and then again for one you are – I’ll remember you.
4. Most importantly – honestly! – is to proof-read your resume. If you’re reading this blog then chances are you’re applying for a developer position. As someone hiring I tend to expect developers to either be very detail-oriented or know how to use their tools to compensate for their short-comings. If you send me a resume with spelling mistakes, copy-paste errors, and the like you’re out of the running immediately. You’ve just told me you don’t give a crap about the quality of your own work so I’m certainly not letting you get your hands on mine.

It’s really not that hard to stand out from the crowd when applying for a job, which is a shame when you think about it.

Over the weekend I was mucking about with my soon-to-be-released-for-public-consumption site when all of a sudden I started getting routing errors on my stylesheets. Madness, that, expecting to need to define a controller and action for stylesheets. Imagine!

Turns out the problem was not with routing per se but with the permissions on the public/stylesheet/ directory. In my mucking it seems I’d set the permissions on that directory to 777 instead of 755. For whatever reason (I’m sure it’s in the Rails source somewhere) that small (and rather dangerously stupid) change switched stylesheet serving from Apache-handled to Rails-handled.

So, beware the permissions for they are strict indeed.

Via Obie Fernandez, the Me Meme.

1.Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4 Post these instructions with your picture.

Wondering what the hell just happened (is happening) to the global banks? This New York Times article is the best accounting of it I’ve read thus far: As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action.

This is what a credit crisis looks like. It’s not like a stock market crisis, where the scary plunge of stocks is obvious to all. The credit crisis has played out in places most people can’t see. It’s banks refusing to lend to other banks — even though that is one of the most essential functions of the banking system. It’s a loss of confidence in seemingly healthy institutions like Morgan Stanley and Goldman — both of which reported profits even as the pressure was mounting. It is panicked hedge funds pulling out cash. It is frightened investors protecting themselves by buying credit-default swaps — a financial insurance policy against potential bankruptcy — at prices 30 times what they normally would pay.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computerworld soundly debunks the myth that Linux is developed by unpaid hobbyists in their spare time in Who writes Linux: Corporate America:

I’m not sure why the silly notion that “Only .10068% of Linux kernel developers are paid” keeps circulating, but it does. So, let me just say, once and for all, Linux is written, for the most part, by paid software engineers and programmers from major American corporations.
…
By January 24, 2008, when the 2.6.24 Linux kernel was released, over a thousand developers from over 186 companies were contributing to the Linux kernel. That doesn’t count any work done on any particular Linux distribution or other open-source program.

Read his article for the specific details, or the original Linux Kernel Development (April 2008) by the Linux Foundation for the nitty-gritty details.

And a “thank you” to all the companies out there putting money behind Linux.

If you’re in Vancouver and you’re looking for a great job on an interesting project:

DreamBank is hiring.

http://www.dreambank.org

DreamBank is about creating an alternative to traditional gift giving in a way that helps both the planet and important social causes. We’re currently looking for one more software developer with solid experience developing MySQL-driven PHP web sites (aka LAMP).

You’ll be working with the head developer to improve and solidify the current codebase, scope and implement new features, and help plan the technical growth of the company and site.

Real-world Ruby/Rails experience is also definitely an asset as we make considerable use of Rails at DreamBank.

If you’re interested, please send your resume and cover letter in PDF format as well as a links to examples of software you’ve worked on, to info@dreambank.org.

Regards
Chris Cummer
Technical Director, DreamBank

Location: Yaletown, Vancouver
Compensation: 60-70k on contract, depending on experience.
This is a contract job.