Author: giblfiz

The most Interesting Code I Have Ever Written

I wrote this about a month back, and Honestly blew my own mind with it. Its far from the best code I have ever written, something which is further exacerbated by the fact that I was shooting to keep it short and small, which never makes your code good, I was also aiming not to use anything that is not a core function in PHP. The flip side is that I used a lot of really uncommon php calls that do some very, very cool things. At one point this was an ajax app, but I discovered that it could be smaller and cleaner by just using frames.

This will be the first post in a series where I go through this code and explain it, and some of the cooler calls that it is using, as well as some advanced php and programming concepts. But for now I’m just going to give a one paragraph overview of what the code does and get it into the post. There is one other file which I will also post and explain at some point.

So read On to take a look at the nitty-gritty, and get a feel for what it does in total
Continue reading The most Interesting Code I Have Ever Written

Are you proud of your code?

I know that I am consistently ashamed of my code. it is quite rare that I turn out any code which I don’t feel dissatisfied with. (I don’t think this is a reflection on my quality as a coder, I think that most of the code that I encounter is complete crap)

Other people are constantly happy with the code that produce. I wonder what the key difference in there personal outlook is, and if it ultimately makes them happier or sadder, as well as if it makes them better or worse coders and or more or less diligent. (speaking of being ashamed of things, that sentence was horrible)

It seems obvious that those who are always happy with there code would be less likely to revise it, but I’m not sure that this is true. I know that when I do have code that I feel happy about having written, I’m pretty enthused to keep working on it. To make it cleaner and better. On the other hand with most of my code I feel more like “when can I be done with this and work on something that doesn’t suck” I start to get sloppy and try to rush to the finish line, which I’m sure instills bad habits.

So I have decided that I am going to make a real effort to start trying to write code that I’m happy to come back and work on going forward from here. Of course I feel like I make myself that promise every other month.

Strange Projects on the Horizon

On Friday I was approached to work on one of the oddest and probably most ill-conceived projects I have ever encountered, and I might just take it anyway. Basically a company has a very good, very modular framework built for them in C# using .Net by a bunch of Russians who they hired remotely. I can tell by looking at the output that the code is quite modular, if it might be a little unclean. It looks like it would actually be some pretty good code to support.

They have been selling boiler plate instillations of this framework, with just some simple skinning done, and selling them hand over fist, apparently they are making a mint.

So anyway, For some reason they want to hire one of my companies, (and hence me) to do the occasional “special project” for clients who need something that is just slightly more custom than what they have. There are a few basic problems with this.
1) I don’t know C#
2) I don’t know Russian
3) I don’t think I even get access to the code base at all!

It seems that each part of the site that the framework builds can be loaded as a “section” which can easily be included on sites other than the primary site. (that is to say you can throw a little javascript or something into your own website, and have it display, say the friends list from the primary site, and it was built to have this work). For some reason they think it’s a good idea to have me build a second site, in php, that covers their additional functionality, and then have it load each of the bits of the primary site and display them. This seems bizzaro to me, but hey, I’m willing to do it because I bet I can learn something cool and they would still be paying me.

What I’m really hoping is that this is NOT actually what they expect me to do, and that there is a SOAP interface to what the Russians built.

Code refactoring VS feature addition.

I’m currently working on a pretty major overhaul to a custom Content Management System that I wrote for some clients, and I have found that I am both reworking the interface, and doing code refactoring at the same time. I notice that I often end up performing these two tasks simultaneously, partially because its hard to sell clients on pure code refactoring but it does have to happen, and partly because feature creep is an ever-present evil.

The question is, would I do much better to try to wear these hats one at time? would code refactoring first, without changing any features, followed by a round of feature changes result in a more manageable process? Or am I just deluding myself, thinking that something else looks better because I’m not elbows deep in it at the moment?

Totally Hosed My Dev Environment

So I have been trying to play with the Zend Framework, which by all accounts is pretty cool, and trying to get it set up on the dev environment that I have here on my cute little macbook. Sadly, for some reason the version of os X 10.5 that ships with it doesn’t have pdo_mysql support installed (though it has pdo_mysqllite ?? I mean, come on, seriously?) So it’s off to the recompile mines. Sadly, once you recompile PHP you need to recompile Apache, which wouldn’t be a big deal at all other than my not knowing about it and it not giving me anything like a coherent error message regarding this. Fine, whatever….

Next, I discover that I can’t user the PEAR auto-installer, because it can’t find the damn modules directory, and neither can I. I have even tried making new ones in every likely place. What’s worse, I seem to have also lost traditional MySQL support as well.

I’m getting pretty annoyed with OSX here, It’s a damn nice client OS, but it’s driving me nuts on the server side. (Still better than Windows, it’s just a bit like the The Twilight Zone, things are close enough to where they should be to make you think that you know what’s going on, but when you try to actually do something….)

I guess I’ll try MAMP now. I have been meaning to look at that anyway.