The true nature of things

By some reason it seems as if my creativity always peeks when I’m on sick leave. It doesn’t seem totally unheard of thou,  cases that come to mind are Henrik Kniberg and he’s claim that he wrote Scrum and XP from the Trenches under the same circumstances, and some other guy who created a children’s game during one week of sick leave.

I have not done anything that measures up to the just mentioned feats. However I’ve tried a new approach to handle “technical itches”; addressing them right away, as fast as possible. The kind of technical issues that I’m talking about are of the same nature as those in my old idea “What technology could have but did not do for me today“.

Technical itch example: The tediousness of rating a movie online

I had just seen “Back to the Future Part III” and I wanted to give it three out of five stars on filmtipset.se (Sweden’s largest movie community). In order to do that I had to:

• Surf to filmtipset.se
• Log in, if no cookies present
• Search for “Back to the Future Part III”
• Click on the right on in the search results
• Click the little image that says “3″

I did not like this, so I tried to make it better right away, I ended up with the following steps

• Press [Shift]+[Space], to invoke Ubiquity
• Write “fi” (interpreted as filmtipset-rate) followed by “Back to the Future Part III 3″

A lot easier, isn’t it? I think that trivial tasks like this one should be so easy and simple that you shouldn’t need to think about them, nor lose focus from whatever else you are currently doing. An other example that can be found in this chaotic log, is checking your account balance, I can not see why such a trivial task should be more than a few keystrokes away.

The itches I’ve addressed so far have all been solved using fast prototyping, thus they are not very portable, when they are I will make them public.

Usability sure has a long way to go…

I have realized now that maybe I don’t want to “Learn to Code”, It might be something else missing.

Some Agile thinking really struck me, it might seem ovious, at least it is now, afterwards. How to succeed with incremental Software Development; you don’t have to “finish” a class before you deploy/deliver it _the first time_, as long as you can ensure that the initial behaviour of you class is still the same. And you can ensure that by proper use of TDD, test first methodolody. Now, it is probably really hard to do write good tests. If you know the precise requirements of a piece of code at a given time however, you might be quite successful. The problem thou, would be if someone would use this piece of code in an unforseen (none tested) way. So should you write more tests or in some way restrict the usage of the code?

Just had to write this down before I forgot it!

PS. Cha nge the title. DS.

I have never really used a ready made framework before, have been on my way for a long time. After looking around quite a bit and playing around with the MVC examples from PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice By Matt Zandstra, I finally decided to go with the Zend Framework.

I’ve never been a big fan of frameworks, at the same time I’ve always been a big fan of structure, re-usability and separation. So, I kept my action in the back-end department, focusing on libs, web-services, automated processes and other things which doesn’t have a face. Things without faces aren’t cute, thus nobody ever cuddles with them; nobody loves them. Except for me. [More text here]

That was not relevant at all. Zend Framework; don’t love it yet, haven’t seen enough. I’m really sure I will, even just pre-ordered the first book on ZF: “Zend Framework in Action” though MEAP. I have a good feeling about the “in Action” series, bought AJAX in Action a while ago sadly I’ve not got the time to read it yet (that was a complete lie).

[More text here]

Now, writing this I think I realize that I write for sanity, or at least to feel a little bit better about myself. I don’t know why that is exactly, but I think it’s the case.

Feels like maybe I believe that one could be best at everything, or at least that there is a best approach to everything, and I like to do things the “right way”. Maybe this is similar to the good old days when I believed there was something to the idea of right and wrong / good and evil. This might be the same sort of rather far fetched construct which have been brought on to us by nature, reasons of convenience or what ever you prefer.
This could also be of a much more personal basis. Lets say I’m a single child with ever so loving and supportive parents –I was never challenged, I was always the best.

I believe someone with my knowledge in coding and a different wiring (in the head-part) could be a really great developer. I hope that someone will be me. One day.

Parents need to teach their children right from wrong. This is important since right and wrong is nothing but imaginary constructs, thus so fragile. Yet so crucial.

I’m still on sick leave. Since I still am and have been alone mostly, I’ve had a lot of time to think, relax and code. I think I really learned a lot; much of which about Zend Studio Neon [insert link]. Finally we’re getting there we’re about to get a really good IDE from PHP.

I have been following the progress of Eclipse based PHP IDEs the last year or so. However I’ve missed a lot of features both in PHP Eclipse and PDT. Since I’ve been working with Java I know how good things can get and which features you don’t want to live without. Zend Neon is bringing a lot of those features into the PHP world. Here follows a few of the ones which I’ve already grown found of:

• Integrated Unit Testing (using PHPUnit).
• Integrated PHPDoc functionality.
• Code Coverage; the ability to see which parts of your code that actually gets executed.
• Understanding of include/require statements; gives you auto-complete and warns if the target doesn’t exist. And let’s not forget “Organize Includes”.
• Really good understanding of the code, taking (major) PHP version into consideration and warns you when you use deprecated functions, or just code sloppy (use a variable before initiation for instance).

The list could go on for a long time, and then I’ve of course not included features deriving from PDT (Neon extends PDT), Eclipse or external Plugins. Those may include auto-complete in PHPDoc comments, type hinting using the same comments, seamless CVS/SVN integration, remote editing and debugging capabilities, BIRT Integration (never used thou), wonderful WSDL editor and a hundred more…

And if you’re not satisfied with something you can always write your own plugin.

So, I decided to join this internet-community thingie. I feel obligated to. Still, I do not believe I have anything to say, nor the the ability to express this absence of information in words.

At least I didn’t do it all by myself this time, from scratch. As you can see I use the popular wordpress thing. Wordpress forces me to focus on content rather than constructs for managing just that; content. I think maybe it was the last time I was sick for a couple of days straight, I spent one of them building my very own blog. I was satisfied. I didn’t have any content but that wasn’t the point, the point was that I don’t know what the point was. And maybe that’s why I’m back here, at it again.

Anyways to make at least a little bit of sense before it is too late. I would like to learn the arts of coding and I don’t know how to go about. I mean after all it is my job and have been for quite some time. Besides it is my hobby and the kind of thing I think about, having sex (http://www.lavasoft.com/company/blog/?p=275). But no matter what, I do not know how to think or how to approach programming in general. I think I might be in the need of help; a guru willing to take me under h[ie]s wings? Or a long vacation.

This post will most probably only be interesting read sometime in the future. You might look back in my blog history, thinking: “Ooo, so this was how it all started…”.