Dont you just love working in december

While this may seem like a decidedly odd comment , if you think about it for a few seconds you will realize just how true it is. Also i think it would be a good time to mention this is from the perspective of a developer.

This is the only time of the year when requests actually slow down to the point where i can actually go and review old code .Fix things that were meant to be fixed an just never got down to. Personally i feel its the one time in the year when you can do beta testing and not get a backlash from the rest of your team for trying something new.

The other thing is that traffic is always a killer , no matter what time i leave for work there is always traffic. Yet at this time of the year it is simply a breeze to drive to work a everyone is gone on holiday.

The final point that i will make is this , i just know people are going to say but when do we take a break then , i will never make it yadadada. So what you do is you take you holiday in the off peak times when everyone else is working . This way you still get to relax and avoid all the stress of work , its not totally fool proof but it has worked beautifully for me.

~stalkerh

The search for the perfect developer

In South Africa it seems the developer or at least a good developer is becoming harder and harder to find. No matter where you go or what you do getting a good developer is becoming so elusive that it almost like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

The fundamental reason behind this is that most people tend to follow the trend that they build there experience and then move on in short bursts.This is a never ending cycle until said individual actually stops working for a company and either starts their own company or just works as a contractor.

This presents 2 huge problems , company’s have a hard time holding on to developers and developers tend to become undependable.The first problem is usually faced by the smaller company’s who are just starting up , they find and recognize good talent but cant hold onto the person due to financial constraints. With the financial crisis the world has been going through this has become even harder for the smaller company’s that manage to even keep afloat.

The second problem is that the developer never works on one system for a long period of time or till release and doesn’t put the same effort into a system as a person that is in a project for the long term.The thinking being that not only why should i put in time and effort into a system that i am not going to maintain or even use but if there are problems i can always move on and get a better job .But on the flip side there are some cases where because of the financial crisis people have to move on not always because they dont like their current company but because they have to , just to keep themselves afloat.

I personally think that some of the smaller companies are to blame , by constantly hunting for better developers instead of training the ones that they already employ to me better people and by sticking to older technologies they are really hurting their business rather than helping it. From a personal perspective , there is nothing that developers hate more than having to use ancient technologies and by forcing them to use said technologies you end up pushing them away.

Now while this may not be the case with every developer i have seen it happening to frequently to believe its not an isolated incident. So while you may never find the perfect developer in this world as an employer what compromise’s do you make when you hire a new person. I know many people use probation as a safety net in case things go south while other people put candidates through stringent tests. While all of these do help to filter out the weeds , in the end i think the perfect developer is one that has been brought up and nurtured in the environment they want to work in.

As a employer or employee what are your thoughts ?

~stalkerh

Weekly Code-a-thon

Ok so the other day Steven tagged me on a coding challenge , challenge being to write up some code that people could use / Find interesting / just about anything that had to do with coding :) . Alas i do not have the time to do this daily so i decided to do it on a weekly basis.

On a second note i did not have the time to think up super cool as him and decided to just present a project that i am currently working on.
[...]

My Short URL

When we get down to programming techniques, I have tried most of them out at some time or another , that is with regards to the .Net framework. Alas the one thing I have been trying to find a use for is http handlers.

Handlers are an integral part of the ASP.net framework , but also one of the more tricky things to use since they have no general outstanding features. They allow you to write general system wide modules , so for the average person that has worked with .Net, the use of handlers is not very apparent.

Not to long ago I came across a small problem at work that was solved very nicely using an http handler and I thought I should share this. The general problem was the following: like every other business out there, we have to interface with many other systems that are not controlled by us and as such there are many changes that need to be made workable using workarounds. The particular problem revolved around the specified field being used to store an internal URL (so that it can be used at a later stage ) being too short and since they would not change the column size we were left with a system that could not function.

So I proposed the following solution to the team; create a local in-house shrinker. Due to security reasons we could not leave our URLs on an external server , so the thought of using a shrinker or any of the likes was out of the question. So all that we did was create a single fully indexed table to store the original URL and return the ID to the user as part of a clean URL using the handler.

The beauty of this setup is that it can be implemented without affecting the users. A very good example of this is ELMAH.  It is by far one of the coolest implementations of http handlers. It’s able to intercept any errors that occur in your web app and handle them as defined in your web.config .

Just remember there is aways more than one way to do something in .Net ;) .

~stalkerh

A Dragonfly can’t Rise from its Ashes

Unlike a phoenix , a dragonfly can’t rise from its ashes. To get the full understanding of this article I recommend reading the original, down at polymath programmer.

The basis of the post was that just like a dragonfly that skims the water when it flies over it, a lot of people these days never seem to read things in full (the entire text) and naturally this leads to all kinds of frustrations from both the reader and the writers perspective.

Also, in the above mentioned article, the writer made a nice point saying that most dragonflies die after approximately 4 months. In the same way the information that article skimmers gain is never long lived, be it in the way they use the information or propagating it to other people. The information always stops as soon as they find the next big thing.

Using this same analogy, I would like to apply this to games as well. In recent times I have been noticing the very same trend which is especially common in Xbox 360 games.

Gamers tend to rush a game to such a point that they are basically skimming the story and all the other features that games present to users. The one reason for this is that Xbox users want as much gamerscore points as possible and then simply move on to the next game. The other reason is that during the holiday period so many games are released at such close intervals, that for a gamer to play all these games they end up rushing a game just to play the next. While there are many gamers that will come back to play a game some more, not all do this and the majority just continues on and only return if the game makes some kind of debut in the news.

I would like to ask all gamers out there reading this to take time when they play the next best game. Enjoy everything from the music to the textures and the lighting. Lastly remember to take a few minutes once you have finished the game to let the credits roll cos you never know if it’s going be your name on that list next time.

Edited by: Raymond Beets & Francois Wiid

Is it safe to wake a hibernating language ?

I love ASP.net / C# and i love them with a passion to the point that i use it at just about any point possible i can when i develop applications.

Unfortunately that love for the language bit me in the proverbial behind. While i do keep up with whats happening in the Dev Tech market as new languages are phased in and old ones phased out i still tend too look out for the .Net specifics and tend to let the rest take a place on the back burner.
[...]

Protonote Beta & MGB Beta the ultimate collaboration

So i recently got a chance to look at Protonote and i have to say that it is certainly interesting and it works very well.

Since i got it working so well i decided to integrate it MGB so that i can hopefully push the development a bit more.The problem that i find that protonotes sovles is that making notes on a site is such a problem. To notify a developer either a forum has to be setup or a blog is used or something of the like. While this works generally ,i have found that with web site development if the people are not meeting face to face it can be hard to pin point changes that they want a developer to make. This leads to screen shots flying around with squiggles all around and doesnt really help with keeping track of scope creep.

Protonote allows notes to be hooked directly to a site just like how a normal post it is stuck on anything else. The best part is that all of this can be hooked up to a MySql Database and can be tracked and monitored.

Go over to http://mgb.codebreaker.co.za and give it a try, to me as a web developer this is a invaluable tool.

Welcome to the virtual world

So the one thing that i have always been fascinated with more than Coding and Dev is Virtual Environments. I mean what is there not to like about them , you get to have a another machine within your machine that you can use to mess around with till it falls apart and start again with no consequences

While there are many providers out there that provide the applications to host your virtual machines , there are so many pros and cons its hard to choose a good provider.

If you willing to pay for the service then VMWare is by far the best, but if you use windows then you are in a bit of luck since Microsoft Provides a free Virtual PC that you can use. For Mac there is Parallels which works just as well.Recently Sun released xVM VirtualBox which is free for personal use, and man i must say that this is buy far the best option of all for the single user.

Some of the features that really caught my eye was the fact that you could assign each virtual machine a RDP port and basically leave the machine on which it is installed on to act as a server and then remote desktop to the virtual machines from your desktop. Another out of the box feature that i found interesting was the fact that it supports Intels and AMD’s virtualisation features which to me is a awesome leap forward.

The other good thing with them is that they have a release for any distribution under the sun :) .This helps with deep virtualisation testing as well as speed testing.

But as i stated in the start VMWare is the king when it comes to its multitude of products and the support of those products, i can only hope that Sun catches up with something similiar.

The market for these products is too big to be owned by one company only ,so here’s to new virtual applications for free.

Also if you have not yet tried Sun’s product yet i encourage you to do so since it is one great piece of software.

My Game Buddy 0.5

New Version released :

• Improved loading times.
• Permission Acquired to use site data
• Added better error handling for I.E. and Firefox
• Increased amount of data loaded from Zaps
• Misc other back end fixes

Keep the comments comming , thanks to those that commented already.

My Game Buddy 0.4

Ok finally updated the website to 0.4 , users can now search the respective sites live and data will be loaded.

Please note that data is only taken from the respective sites every 8 hours to prevent dos attacks. The rest of the time the data will be loaded from the database.

Also comments are now live and active , any comments sent will be sent to me.

Please leave a comment here if you have any other idea or such.