Dev Dawn

Now, I don’t know about you, but ever since I read R.A.Salvatore’s first Drizzt books (The Crystal Shard, Streams of Silver, The Halfling’s Gem), Dual-wielding weapons is the first thing I take in rpgs … it’s what I dream about as a legendary warrior, it’s what I practice with broomsticks when nobody is watching.

But anyway. Bill’s experiences of late have unearth two facets of Dual-Wielding in Development.

1. Support
   There is the helpdesk-y, support calls, functionality. A system where all calls are logged, client’s ring and have someone walk them through working parts of the program, fixing problems over an instant messenger.

   This is the part of support that everyone knows about. Rightly so. It’s 50%. Maybe more.

   The other, hidden, rarely spoke of side, is that of the Account Manager. Nothing to do with Accounting, but everything to do with the Clients. The Account Manager is the Client’s direct link into the matrix. They are there to chat, to argue with, to give feedback, to be supportive. The Account Manager is the public face to the System.

   A very important role. There isn’t any way of getting around it.

   The problem is, I would think, that most of the time this role is handled by either the Head of Support, or the Developer themselves, or even the Manager of the Company.

   Once you get past 1 client, you really need to have an Account Manager. Or at least be able to compartmentalise your brain into different jobs.

2. Updates
   This is probably more than a “Dual”, but I really liked the intro.

   This is functionality that occurs once the software is out there, and you have a bunch of different types of Clients. Actually, it pretty much would be limited to Dual. But … anyway.

   You have client’s who only want the Point Releases, stable. Then there are client’s that are willing to beta releases, test them, get the new functionality sooner.

   So how to solve this? Have dual Install Streams. Or Update Streams. The nomenclature doesn’t matter here, it’s the idea. And it’s not hard to implement, just need to have the design in place. To be able to control what the client downloads, how their “client” talks to the “server”, what rules are in place for these interactions.

So there is my latest little brick in the pavement that makes up my journey along Development Highway. There is a lot more than could be said about these elements. Maybe later, or maybe someone else.

Dual-wielding. It’s the bomb.

Okay. So this isn’t much to do with Development.

Ahem.

Over here in Kangaroo-Dundee land, we’ve recently been subjected to the massive advertising campaign (from Coca-Cola) for Coke Zero.

Now. I’m a massive Sprite Zero fan. When I gave the Atkins Diet a shot (for about 4 months), Sprite Zero was my beverage of choice, having had to give up Diet Coke.

So, I’m not biased against massive corporations or anything like that.

It’s just that the latest campaign from Coca-Cola has me a little worried. Not “Sabretooth is hunting me” kind of worry. I’m quite happy to accept I’m being a little too much of a conspiracy buff/nutt … but … here goes.

I think they’re promoting anarchism, or something like it. Maybe that wasn’t the initial goal of the people in their Marketing Dept., but it’s the end result of the ads.

There is a message clear across each of the ads (tv, radio?, newspapers, billboards, …) that I’ve seen so far. That we should be living for zero resposibility. Zero end weekends, zero this, zero that. Zero consequences.

Maybe I’m just pushing to far and hard. This may well be the case. I can’t believe that a company as big as Coke would start pushing one specific ideology upon the public … but maybe they are.

I’m not writing this to give voice to my own political/spiritual/etc persuasions … just something that I’ve noticed. The more I think about it, the more it seems real.

So anyway. Perhaps I’m wrong. The guys at Coke are probably the biggest fat-cat capitalists who wouldn’t want to see their slavering masses rise against the given structures in our cultures/lands. Or maybe they really have put something in the drink that’s a supa-powerful mind-control serum thingy.

Or maybe I’ve been reading too many comics.

Anyway. Thanks for the read.

I’m finally putting into place the beginnings of an idea, that I call … Spherical Phoke. Some kind of clever play with words, maybe not so clever. Developers are supposed to think outside of the square … so, we are Spherical Phoke. Aww, c’mon, that makes perfect sense.

Anyway, it’s going to begin with Interviews of Developers/Techo-Bloggers/… from across the globe.

One interesting thing is that I’m trying to implement the initial part of the funcitonality using Jalenack’s Wordspew, for the interview. I like the idea of having a bit of flexibility in the interviewing, rather than a form to fill out, or an email to respond to. Of course, if this doesn’t work, I’ll most probably be doing something like that :).

I have a report to code now, but hopefully I’ll be done in time to get Wordspew running the way I want.

Till Later We Meet

Have finally thrown down the gauntlet, to myself, and gotten into some of the code that drives the blog.

So the site has undergone some “improvements”. We’ll take some time to see if they really do enhance the site, or detract.

In my browsing of blogs, I found a post on Paul’s blog about Sociable, which led me to … Sociable. It’s a pretty simple, but very sweet, plugin. Satisfies, to me, the basic goodness of what plugins do. Enables me to have cool functionality without me having to create that functionality from scratch (no matter to what degree I understand said functionality).

Anyway, as soon as you click on an article, you’ll see it in action. Gives you the opportunity to bookmark the article/post in a few of the different Social Bookmarking (for want of a better description) sites around.

Also, there are a couple of cosmetic changes to the layout. I am falling particularly in love, lately, with big headings. Not sure how this came about, I thought I was pretty minimalist at my design heart, but apparently not at the moment.

Anyway, more coming. In lots of different directions.

p.s. Sorry for anyone who visited hoping for a repeat of last Friday night’s actions. I was very very excited about doing another Quick Dev … but a number of factors cancelled that out.

Suffice to say, I’ve almost finished the initial touches on a sub-domain that will be the hub for my Quick Dev stuff. Not sure on that name though … it’s more about becoming a better developer, by practicing the art. The more you push yourself, the more you learn.

Anyway, enough for the moment.

Okay. So I haven’t pimped any Slashdot articles in a while.

This one led me to File System Design part 1: XFS. It’s a pretty interesting read, especially for someone who didn’t really have a clue about how the insides worked. Hardware and software -wise.

The writer’s (Narayan Newton) infectious verve, his excitement, actually helps me to get through the article. My brain doesn’t take well to hardcore stuff like this, but I think I understood most of it. The trees harked back to uni, and the discussion on harddrives, sectors, etc etc was pretty cool.

What got me most, was the big theoretical differences in scalability between NTFS and this particular file system, XFS. 2 TB as opposed to 18-19 million TB. That’s some scalability.

A nice little cache of information to store somewhere in the inner regions of my brain.

Not an actual program update, but the Install exe has been updated with a missing dll.

Download :: Sibisy 0.1.0

As the kids and I were driving home from the video store tonight, the tale of the Tortoise and the Hare popped into my head. Not sure exactly why, perhaps it came from something the kids were talking to me about.

Anyway.

It’s got a good lesson for development, buried at the surface.

The moral of that particular fable is not about speed. It’s about … attitude. Aesop took two extremes to illustrate his point, but it could have equally been two hares, or two tortoises. The difference between the two was attitude.

It is the same with development. You can have two gurus, one who will continue to work at something long after the other is in the dust. It is even more true when you have the guru and the not-so-guru. The temptation to have a lazy/bad attitude to development are far greater when it comes as natural as breathing. When you have to work long and hard to break through, it’s easier to be more aware.

But whatever you are, however your brain works, it boils down to the same thing. Somewhere along the line, and probably for most of said line, it’s gonna be tough. The coding, the selling/marketing, the support/install/training, the “humility” when dealing with clients afterwards. All these things are going to have a fair percentage of hard work attached to them. Slog work.

This afternoon I was faced with this head on. I found a particular problem within the functionality. It could have lain anywhere within about 4 levels of procedures. Intimidating to my caffiene-slowed brain, to say the least. But slowly I pursued the goal. Like a hound, chasing down it’s prey. A slow, slow hound, who wanted a diet coke badly.

Eventually, after fixing an incidental problem that confused the initial issue somewhat, I discovered the cause, fixed it … and BOOM, the sums added up.

Oh happy day!

Anyway. Attitude. Apart from anything, you aren’t going to get anywhere in the complete picture with a bad attitude. You might succeed in some areas, but the more clients you get, the more people you meet, the more chance there is that bad attitude will turn them away.

So I’m turning around towards something Bill and I were discussing today, mentioned briefly above. Sorry Bill, wasn’t stealing your IP … heh heh. That another step in the development cycle, the complete cycle, is to be able to suck it in and take humility by the horns. Or rather, meekly submit, especially when you’ve got clients getting antsy.

Meekness doesn’t mean weakness. It means you’re okay with not being right in other people’s eyes all the time. It’s okay for them to think that they are right. After all, they just might be. But whether they are or not doesn’t matter. If it’s just a “mine is bigger than yours” argument, then it should never be an issue. It doesn’t make you any less of a developer, and most of the time, people respect strength of character and true humility far better than arrogance and meglomania.

Anyway … ‘Nuff said. Babbled on a little longer than I meant to.

So I’ve just spent a few hours trying to upgrade Dev Dawn into the latest Wordpress, and K2 theme. And whoalllaaaahhh! Nothing.

It blew up in my face. I think I need to break things down a little further, and make each step work. Am just very glad that I have a working Apache environment on my laptop, and make backups.

So I’ve got a few inklings as to why my recent activities didn’t raise any kind of excitement at all. Not even a comment. But that’s cool …

• The idea is still not fully-formed. I don’t have a name for what i’m doing yet.
• There was no single idea for people to immediately grasp and say, hey, I like what he’s on about.
• There were about 5 posts in the span of a couple of hours, too hodge-podge.

So I have to resolve the idea behind Sibisy, and all the other projects I will hopefully be doing. Get a name, create some guidelines, have a set format, make a mission statement … stuff like that. I’ll also put up a subdomain of DevDawn to give it a better singlular purpose.

‘Nuff said for the moment.

Well, I was cleaning up, and discovered that I didn’t put any Uninstall options into the installer. Bit of a problem that. I’ll update this in the morning.