story so far at Php UK 2010

Posted on February 26th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

Wow, wish I got home a bit earlier last night after the PHP social. Don't believe I crashed out finally about 2am after chatting to a few people including Jeremy about various things relating to coding, organising conferences, stories from PHP NW 09. But before all that there was an interesting chat about designing a REST api and saying how bad the twitter api was, more Php Hip Hop and also some guy ranting about how great Drupal is. Was tempted to jump up and counter with how great Modx is but was enjoying me beer too much and it looked liked people had enough with chats! Going to have to leave that till next month!

Made it to the PHP UK conference today and this morning got to hear Josh Holmes do the keynote talk about "The lost art of simplicity", of course was much more abstract chat but so many elements ring true such as the instinct of developers to over build for something simple. Then went on to hear Stefan Priebsch chat about Anti-php patterns, a talk on bad habits or mi-interpretations of patterns. Then followed to Rowan Merewood on his chat about "Living with legacy code", a talk about how to deal with legacy code when trying to update/integrate it with new code. I always like Rowans code with his great injection of his personal style of presenting and humour. Loved the comic book style slides :)

Just had lunch and I really should mingle a bit more…

ps apologies for any typos and mistakes on this post, the usual amount of checking and editing I would normally do!

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secret london is live!

Posted on February 16th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development, London gems.

Holy crap! I don't believe they did it! The crew at secretlondon.us have just gone live with the site!!!!

Check out the blog entry as well! Glad to see the map working, gonna have to put a few more hours in to make it more amazing!

update – Holy crap! My mug is on tech crunch!

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Difference between Tracer Code and Prototyping – approaches to better software development

Posted on January 19th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

After all the xmas fun and what not, I decided to finally get round to try and catch up with some more reading the Pragmatic programmer and I thought it be best in this post to cover some of the things that jumped into my head. The Pragmatic Programmer has been recommended by people as a guide to subjects associated to a programmer's role including things such as approaches to development, architecture, personal development, testing and teams. This purchase came about because of the realisation that the more projects I undertake, the more I realise the science of software development is a myth, it is a black art. We never know what we are building *exactly*. On recent projects and on the currently one I am on now I was trying to figure the balance between building a prototype to try figure out the feasibility of what we can build is actually achievable, versus to 'just getting on with building it'. I thought there was a balance to be achieved to building something to be reused and building something to be thrown away. In one chapter that sticks out for me, it discusses tracer bullets as an analogy. Tracer bullets helps a gunner, it checks if the shot they are taking is on the right track by flaring up and shows a path it takes towards the end target. Tracking code is much the same idea, build code that is usable and aims to fulfills a end requirement. The operative word is 'aims'. Very much half the time, we build on what we know or think we know. Creating tracer code helps us create a working 'thing' as an idea to try figure out whether we are on the right track when we show it to people. A prototype is a proof of concept. I seemed to be quite hung up about wasting time on creating prototype code which I can't reuse, I then read the following paragraph :

Prototyping generates disposable code. Tracer code is lean but complete, and forms part of the skeleton of the final system. Think of prototyping as the reconnaissance and intelligence gathering that takes place before a single tracer bullet is fired.

I realise more from my reflection that my analytical nature is at times stopping me to "just build it" on projects. Seems like a classical case of 'analysis paralysis' at the first step! With a recent project I then noticing myself just trying to put a whole bunch of code together to get past my first hurdle after reading more about the idea of the duck tape programmer. From these sort of related readings I have these guiding principles (until some other crazy idea skips along) :

  • Prototyping is to test whether something will actually work if you build it, that you should be prepared to throw away and therefore DONT SPEND TIME MAKING IT PRETTY(forget comments, coding standards and refactoring)
  • Tracer code is where you *might* build something that may end up in the first release
  • Refactoring is not as important as making something work and breaks sometimes, then something that doesnt work at all
  • Tell the user what should work! And what will work at a later …at some point

Maybe this time next year, I'll understand at a better level the approach to development!

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