The Technician - Latest Comments

Re: Development without Internet Access

Jeremy Hitchcock — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:39:32 -0000

I wouldn't get down on it. If I wanted to play Battleship, I'd look for an online game and be entertained or I could dig through my old CS stuff and find my assembler version - I'll be more entertained with the first. In the same way, is it wrong to use a module, complex built-in, etc?

It's about focus and knowing that there are certain things that only you can do. Do those and nothing else.

Re: Development without Internet Access

Jessica Darko — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:26:31 -0000

I remember those days. I remember having many books open on my desk at the same time. One on top of each other. Since they were stacked like this I couldn't see the covers or spines, but I knew them by thickness. I'd pull out all those books constantly for reference material. You didn't google for framework info, you had a book on the framework.

Development was much slower.

There's a limit to how much you can keep on the tip of your memory. I learned early on that when I'd go on a job interview and get quized with questions like "What's the API to do X in win32? What's the parameters?" that the place was a crappy place to work-- that's what books are for! Anyone who memorizes that crap has forgotten all the really important stuff about architecture, etc.

Anyway. The net has replaced the books. This may explain why the books these days are often much lower quality than I remember them being...

Re: SXSW isn’t for Backend Devs Anymore

kfalter — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:39:27 -0000

Agree with your comment about sxsw switching from doing cool stuff to talking about what is believed to be cool. So many things shift their focus away from core competency once the masses jump on the bandwagon. It's always hard to walk that line between appealing to the masses slightly and becoming diluted kool-aid.

Re: Explain your code

David — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:26:30 -0000

Fantastic idea :)

Re: I'll buy time any day.

Joshua Dance — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:04:53 -0000

To true. I think we all forget this sometimes. We will spend lots of time answering surveys, and taking tests, and doing things we don't like to save a little bit of money, when we wasted a lot of time. Thanks for the post.

Re: Gmail actually gets something really wrong.

chrishenry — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:47:03 -0000

While I'm torn on the matter, I can't say it benefits all. The purpose of clipping was surely to provide speed, bu it does so at the cost of damaging the reputation of anyone attempting to provide a rich, beautiful experience via email. While we *are* somewhat of an edge case, our broken newsletter could be considered an exception to what Gmail is trying to achieve. Our users, who appreciate great design, lost out. We, as a company, lost credibility.

Re: Gmail actually gets something really wrong.

eric — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:50:38 -0000

Simple solution, really, and benefits everyone: Don't use HTML email. That is all.

Re: A tool to DRY off

Ira Baxter — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:01:55 -0000

AFAICT, Bergmann's CPD only finds bits of code that consist of source lines that are exactly the same. Running it on Joomla produces something like 1% detected clones.

See CloneDR at www.semanticdesigns.com/Produc... for a copy-paste detector that works on huge code bases, and detects clones that are copy-paste-*edit*, even if the variables are renamed, the code is reformatted, and/or comments are changed/inserted/deleted. Running this Joomla finds that the code is 15% made of clones.

Re: The Technician, now on a Cloud Server

Angela Bartels — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:42:14 -0000

Hello,

Great to see you are now on The Rackspace Cloud, welcome! I wanted to mention that we do offer DNS support and would like to know more of what you are requiring as we'd like to help. Send me an email when you have a chance.

Thanks again!

Angela Bartels
The Rackspace Cloud
@rackcloud

Re: Explain your code

Japh — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:02:46 -0000

Interesting... I could definitely tell you what I think of my own code. Most of the time, it's a good indication of where I'm at at that moment.

Nice post :)