Drinkingbird: Category Ramblings

You should care what your code looks like

Chris — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:03:00 -0600

The latest post over at Coding Horror, “Nobody Cares What Your Code Looks Like” is one of the strange posts that pop up occasionally where it seems that Jeff Atwood has missed the point entirely.

The elegance/ugliness of the code behind an application is immensely important in the maintenance and extension of any software, and particularly for open source software where it’s crucial that people want to work on your code.

The mind boggles, really. Well, at least I got through that without making a jab at Jeff for his VB use.

The Importance of Openness

Chris — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:10:00 -0600

I’ve started on a new job hunt after being stuffed around and finally fired from a small, and dysfunctional web development company.

Looking around, I’ve realised that I should have been building up a public portfolio, of sorts, before now.

So far, the only thing I’ve released into the wild has been a small, capistrano module, for a very specific, and in my mind ill conceived, application. All the interesting stuff I’ve done has long been scrubbed from my hard drive, in compliance with long-winded NDAs from previous employers (including a rather nifty library for controlling mobile phones through their inbuilt modems to simulate and test network response/reliability).

I suppose my rambling boils down to the advice that you should, if possible, release your work to the public, and if you can’t, you damn well better be knocking up some personal projects to show off your skill.

Off to try to find something interesting to develop, I guess.

New blog christening!

Chris — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:17:00 -0500

Well, here goes. After years of steadfast resolve I’ve given in, and started up my own little, self-centred part of the web.

There was a bit of fiddling about to get this thing up and running, but now that’s done I’ve just got to figure out what to write here :).

Hopefully there’ll be some useful tech stuff, eventually, but knowing my general approach to unmoderated speech, it might get a bit buried in pointless rambling and poorly directed vitriolic outbursts.

Oh well, maybe I’ll try to keep this thing under wraps for a while until I can write something without sounding like an angsty teen with a large vocabulary.