Why do IT Pros seem to have so much free time?
Tag: programming
Programming Gives You Real Life Bad Habbits…
It may be cliche, but it seems that people who get good at writing software are motivated by laziness. If everyone was as constructively lazy as a good programmer is, the whole world would be more efficient.
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I wish I could grep my keys.
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Programming teaches you that the universe is predictable and deterministic. I’ve personally found that this has shaped my expectations and fed my impatience with people and things that are not.
There’s a positive side to this – I think that spending time in an environment where you can’t “fudge” the answer or bullS**t your way through (you can’t “kind-of” sort a set of integers, and it won’t sort unless you tell the computer exactly what to do, and correctly) has sensitized me to b.s. in other environments, from commercials to claims about tax cuts – I just find it much more obvious when people are clearly hand-waving/fudging an answer.
If you are a bit geeky, you will be lol for hours!
What does the offshoring backlash tell us?
After 2 years of excuses, laziness, constant turnover (complete waste of training time when the guy/girl buggers off and leaves you with a new muppet), terrible or copied-from-Google code, never-ending bugs, headaches, baffling phone calls where no-one understood each other, emails that promised to “do the needful” but went ignored, applications that just didn’t work, MILLIONS of dollars, and much, much more……. we had enough, and told the Indian coding behemoth we’d had enough and brought our dev team back in house.
Saying that things go more smoothly is a massive understatement. Don’t know why we bothered. Oh yes, some spreadsheet said it would be cheaper.
When writing software the developer needs to be in constant communication with both the project manager and the author. Out-sourcing your coding just doesn’t work. In my experience a programmer often has a completely different take on how to solve a problem to most other people, they will often find the simplest and most efficient way of producing software, which while it sounds good is often not the best method.
Any well rounded developer knows that sometimes the specs given to them can be illogical or not well thought through by an author or project manager that doesn’t fully understand the coding process. This means that the full team building a particular piece of software need to be flexible to some degree and this cannot be acheived when outsourcing.
It doesn’t even have to be incomplete specs that will upset the process, clients love to change their minds, especially when they see a prototype of their software. Things I hear all to regularly are ‘can we move that to there’, ‘what if we swapped this round’ or the dreaded ‘Oh, actually I don’t need that bit any more…’
So on paper it may look like it is a lot cheaper to outsource, but in the long run the lack of communication, understanding and flexibility will have you wishing you had seen sense when that email from an asian coding beast offering you the chance to slash your development costs drops into your inbox.
Zend Developer Zone | The Best Tool For The Job: OO versus Procedural Programming in PHP
Introduction
“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.” (Winston Churchill)In PHP, unlike many other languages, you can choose between using an object oriented (OO) or a procedural approach. Most PHP programmers use a procedural approach by default, since web pages themselves operate in a very procedural way (this tag, then this tag, then this tag). Interspersing procedural code with HTML is more straightforward, and so PHP programmers often develop their own style, based on this approach.
If you are new to PHP, procedural programming is probably the only kind of programming you are familiar with. However, if you have been exploring the PHP community for best practices, by now you have probably seen posts in forums and newsgroups about “object bloat”. You have probably also seen tutorials on how to write object oriented code in PHP. You may have downloaded libraries that employ classes, and learned to instantiate their objects and use their methods. Yet it is quite possible that you have never really understood when, where, or why it is appropriate to use an object oriented approach.
There is a certain amount of ranting on both sides of the issue, and slogans such as “Objects are bad!” or “Objects are good!” are sometimes heard. This article does not attempt to decide between the two approaches and come up with a single “best practice”, but to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.