The Importance of being Developer-Friendly

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I’ve been working with a legacy framework the last couple of weeks. It’s something that’s been in production for over 6 years and you can definitely tell. There are files checked in with dates as extensions, always a sure sign of legacy. It’s obvious that there hasn’t been any new developers coming onto the project because the documentation is out-of-date and the entire process is wonky.

A very large problem is that everything needs to be setup with production paths or it is almost impossible to get up-and-running. I’ve been spoiled by how Rails handles the environments. Being able to separate what is for local development, what is QA testing and what is for production is an amazing way of allowing developers to get involved quickly and easily.

If you don’t have that, developers will flail around, searching thru config files or trying to follow stack traces, hoping some information can be gleaned from error messages. It isn’t easy and very frustrating and generally causes someone to lose all interest in future development.

DropBox

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I’ve been using DropBox for the past few days and it is really nice especially the sharing aspect. I’ve been able to give co-workers access to a collection of folders which have various tarballs inside. This is so much better than trying to upload attachments to a Wiki page or emailing them around.

Great stuff!

Clearing the Clutter

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I couldn’t take it any longer. My desktop was an absolute mess. All of things I’ve downloaded over the past year were stacked up and it was driving me nuts. I took the time to go through all of the files, deleting ones which were just archives, moving others to particular folders for future use and generally just making my view cleaner.

I have lots of windows open, everything from TextMate to iTerm so usually the desktop is just in the background but when it was so cluttered I could see the files piled up behind the scenes.

Will this help me at all? Who knows? But at least I’m not seeing little file icons everywhere. That has to be good for something, doesn’t it?

Teaching Kids

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Great blog from a middle-school math teacher. I really like the way he dealt with a review day.

Today, I actually had a great time doing my reviews. I think all my students got something out of it. I considered doing a game, I considered having presentations, I considered just going through problems. Instead, I did the most simple thing: handed out a set of 10 problems. [1]

My instructions were simple. Do NOT work in order. Pick the problem that you are most scared of, that you don’t understand well, that you least want to see on the test. Then use today to learn how to do it. Look at your notes, ask your neighbors, ask me. Once you’ve mastered that, move to the next most difficult problem.

This is really awesome. I really want to figure out a way to incorporate this idea both in work and when helping the kids study.

Slammed

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Well, that wasn’t fun. It’s something you are taught in Little League though, you can’t walk that many people and expect to win. You especially can’t get up on a hitter 0-2 with 2 outs and then walk him. That’s a recipe for losing.

The Cubs didn’t have it last night especially Ryan Dempster. I really thought he’d pitch well but now it’s up to Big Z. Game 2 is tonight.

Thought of the Day

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Would it be such a terrible thing? If newspapers were managed by new groups of people with no real romantic link to the glory days of newspapers, and freed from management grown fat and lazy on the easy profits of the glory days of American local newspapers maybe titles can innovate again and start thinking about how they serve audiences better in print and online rather than arguing about trivial details of the content of dying Monday to Friday newspapers or creating unreadable wrappers for supermarket inserts on Sundays.

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