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Tag Archives: philosophy

“WTH is happening to Rails?” I’ll tell you.

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I just read the blog post that got some traction on HN last night, entitled “What the hell is happening to rails?” It goes on to list a litany of complaints against changes in Rails 3.x, ranging from the default commenting of the catch-all route to, yes, of course, CoffeeScript. They all end up sounding a lot like “I don’t like change,” an argument we’ve all heard before. The difference is that Steve Coast, the post’s author, casts himself in the role of a crusader for the newbies. He says that he, personally, “gets” why these changes were made, but that the most recent versions of Rails are actually harder to learn than the older ones were. The post highlighted two things, to me:

  1. Some people still miss the point of Ruby on Rails, even after all these years.
  2. There’s a difference between “easy to learn” and “easy to use,” and when these competing goals butt heads, the latter should always win out.

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Jun 14, 2011

How Writing Libraries Restored my Faith in Open Source

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37signals recently announced that they intend to drop support for OpenID authentication in their products. Good move. Even as a geek — someone who understands the reasoning behind OpenID — I’ve always found the actual implementations of OpenID to be needlessly cumbersome. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about how a parenthetical in a comment by DHH on a HN post about the news helped me realize something huge about my experiences in the open source community.
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Jan 25, 2011

Coder Archetypes: The Line Worker and the Artist

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It’s no secret that there are two types of coders out there. The first went out and got a CS degree because someone once told him that there’s a good future in anything having to do with computers. We’ll call him the Line Worker. The second has a passion for coding. His degree might not be in CS. He may not even have a degree (oh, the humanity!), but he loves to code. He’s an Artist. It’s not just a day job for him. Companies who don’t seek out and retain Artists are doomed.
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Aug 4, 2010

PHP: A Bridge Too Many?

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Development language preferences are funny things. I’m well aware of the benefits that come from being familiar with many languages, not least of which is the perspective needed to discern the right tool for each job. As they say, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve had exposure (in varying degrees) to a fair number of programming languages in my time: BASIC, Pascal, Ada, C, Bourne Shell, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Javascript, VB, and Ruby among them, so I feel as though I do have some general ideas about the kinds of features I look for in a language.

All that being said, there are some tools that I can’t help but wonder about. PHP is one of them.
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Aug 20, 2008

Today, you’re as dumb as you’ll ever be.

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If you’ve been coding for a while, particularly if you spend much time with the agile development crowd, you’ve probably heard the term YAGNI, or “You Ain’t Gonna Need It.” Simply put, this principle states that we shouldn’t spend time adding features or flexibility that you don’t need right now, because it’s likely that you ain’t gonna need it later, either. I recently purchased Russ Olsen’s excellent book, , in which he makes one of the most eloquent and succinct arguments for YAGNI I’ve yet seen.
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Aug 19, 2008

The Escalator Principle

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I love Google’s quote of the day feature. Every so often a real gem shows up there. Today was one of those days. Let me introduce you to the Escalator Principle.

“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”
       -Mitch Hedberg, comedian

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Apr 8, 2008

The Joy of User-Driven Development

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One of the reasons I’ve been such a proponent of people at my current job reading Getting Real is that it describes the way I’ve approached development ever since I got started in the field. Now, mind you, I’m not a “classically trained” developer. As such, I just went with the way of doing things that made the most sense. Silly me. While the number of programmers doing things in a manner that makes sense is growing every day, we, members of the so-called agile development crowd, are still decidedly counterculture in the corporate world.

Anyway, some events occurred this week that made me feel a retrospective of one such development project was in order.
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Mar 28, 2008