Gifted Slacker

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are working on a new site. I think they’ve got a great idea there.

What they should stop doing immediately is posting their phone conversations as a podcast. I tried listening to the first one and all I can say is no thanks. Please stop, now.

Nobody wants to listen to a boring conversation topped with poor sound quality.

… so I wrote most of a simple trivial pursuit game in Ruby. It’s very basic, and I don’t have any real questions for it, and I’m not doing the “pie” scoring so it’s really just a trivia game with a Trivial Pursuit shaped board.

It was a fun waste of time but I would have preferred sleep.

(No I won’t post the code. It’s throw-away crap to help me nail some more Ruby syntax into my brain.)

I was signing up for github and they wanted my SSH public key. In their instructions for how to get and generate the key they have you run a command like this:

• cat id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

pbcopy is a neat Mac utility that takes it’s input and copies it to the clipboard.

So handy.

I don’t do much with bookmarks after I make them in del.icio.us. What I would like is software that would let me enter tags to watch, and then aggregate the bookmarks that  match that tag. I would then be able to select the category of bookmars (Popular, All, Mine) I want to track.

If I had this, I would do so much more with bookmarks from del.icio.us. It should be fairly simple to write an aggregator with Planet Python and serve it with web.py. Maybe I can get around to doing that at some point.

The next person to evangelize PHP to me is getting kicked square in the nuts. If this process of evangelization includes denigrating my choice of programming language, then the offender will be kicked square in the nuts, not once, but twice!

Claiming that PHP “has a function” for everything you could possibly want to do is not a positive argument for the language. Pointing out that PHP comes with a library to do a particular task won’t make me believe that it does that job better than any other language.

This doesn’t mean that I refuse to use PHP. It means, rather, that I would prefer not to use PHP. For instance, using PHP makes the most sense for one of my school projects. So that’s what I’m using.

Please excuse the rant. I’m being exposed regularly to a PHP zealot.

Are you a language-oriented programmer or a tool-oriented programmer? That’s the distinction that this post raises.

I don’t think it matters which side you lean toward. What matters is whether you know when and how to leverage the other perspective when necessary.

For example, I am not a strong web interface builder. (I can design them, but putting in the time with HTML, CSS, and Photoshop is not my cup of tea.) So for my latest project I am going to use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build the front-end. This move goes against my strongly language-oriented grain.

I figure that if the project launches and subsequently draws a user-base that justifies more than one developer, then it will someone else’s job to get every last erg of good out of the front-end code. I just don’t have the competency in that are of development to do an exemplary job. I’m not ashamed to admit this and use a great tool to make up for my weakness.

I can’t actually view the front-end of my blog. Everytime I try and load it my browser goes into an endless loop continually reloading the site. This means I can’t make comments, so if you posted a comment today your response is posted as an update to the entry.

Ethan, this means you.

I’ve been programming way too much lately. The upside is that I am starting to notice some general characteristics of the way I write code.

I was looking at some of my code tonight and realized that I tend to mix metaphors, in a manner of speaking. The code I’ve been writing has been pretty off the cuff, and it seems to come out in a weird mixture of object-orientation, modular-procedural, and functional programming.

For instance, one of the tasks I’m working on is a fairly sophisticated blog scraper. My initial approach had two large, complicated classes: one to determine which urls to visit and another to get data from these and store it in a database.

As I’ve gone along the classes have shrunk considerably. In fact, the first class has disappeared altogether and is now just a module. That module is now decomposing into smaller and smaller functions.

I think my “style” is converging toward functional programming.

At some point I want to go back and rewrite some of this project to make it more functional.

I sometimes lose track of this sort of distinction:

Code is read much more than it is written. If people can’t read your story, they can’t improve it or fix it. Unreadable code has a real cost. This is the famous technical debt

Further:

Programming languages are for humans, not machines. If you have code that looks like it doesn’t do anything useful, is hard to read, or seems tedious, then introduce an abstraction that will let you remove it.

If you want to see what I like and deem bookmark worthy, you can get at my del.icio.us bookmarks.

For those that aren’t familiar with the site, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. I don’t really care about the social aspect, but it’s a good way to keep your bookmarks in one place, accessible from anywhere.