Jeff Atwood recently talked about Curly’s law of doing just one thing. He’s talking about simplifying your code so that it does just one thing. You can take it even one step further and know when you need to refactor and abstract your code. If you find yourself copying and pasting code from one section of code to another, then stop. If you had to do that, then you should create a new class or function that duplicates that code. You will save yourself a world of support headaches in the future.

Technorati Tags: Development, Code reuse, coding, design, refactoring, copy and paste

The web has come a long ways in terms of usefulness. The interfaces are much easier and nicer. It is easier to search and share information. But has it become too easy and too mainstream?

The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge. Robert Scoble

Robert’s comment strikes a chord that I have felt for awhile now. When a medium is opened to the public and becomes mainstream, it starts to loose its effectiveness and perhaps its authority. Look at the history of the Internet. BBS, newsgroups, forums, live chat, social networking, and social bookmarking. When it was a limited group, it had some use. As it grew the voice of the masses’ was heard and it became more useful. It then became popular and mainstream. All of these mediums suffered similar histories. When they became popular and mainstream the noise grew to deafening volumes and blocked out the knowledge.

It is easy to comment and do a straight mind dump or stream of thought. No filtering needed. Who is going to know who you are. Better yet, look at myspace, et al., most don’t understand or care that their lives are an open book for those who know how to look. If you don’t care that other’s know your personal details, why would you care that they find out that you trashed talked about something you knew nothing about? We are or are becoming an open society that hides behind fake annonynimity of digital life. There is no accountability and when you can sign up for a yahoo or other anonymous email account, there isn’t likely to be any anytime soon.

It isn’t as much fallen from grace as it has gone the way of most mass media and popular Internet services.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, social networks, social bookmarking, Digg, MySpace, Responsibility, accountability, audience

I have been loosely following the conversation about River of News, between Robert Scoble and Dave Weiner. I am biased. I like my desktop applications. I always have. But I saw Robert’s comments about trying it and seeing how much easier it was to keep up with the news. Like most, I have a bunch of blogs that I keep up with or try to. Like most, I find that keeping up with it to be difficult. So I wanted to try something that would help me with that.

On first try and look, it took a little bit to get used to. But once I adjusted to how the river worked and google reader handled it was easy to fall in love with it. It works very much like a desktop application. I use it from home and from work, with no configuration and little trouble. I started to use it religously, keeping up with things and finding news items of interest. I could easily share items and mark them to read later, I can even categorize them. All was good.

Today I had read an article and wanted to get back to it. Problem, I forgot to star it and/or tag it. How could I find it again when I wasn’t even sure what feed it was from. I’d have to sort through hundreds of new items to find it. I needed a search button. This made me think about what I use news aggregator for. I tend to skim the news and mark it for later read. I also categorize stuff for easier retrival. So far so good. I also like to use the computer for repeated tasks; I want the computer to search for items that I might want to read. A watchlist. I can’t find either of these functionalities on Google Reader. Things that I would consider to be essential.

Also, my problem with online applications in general still is that for something like this, if the site is down or I am not online I can’t read news. If I use feed demon, I still have everything I need.

Overall, I like what the Google Reader team has done. It is very easy to use and well laid out. The functionality of mobile phone use and bookmarking etc are nice, I’d rather have seen search and watchlists more. Hey Google team, get the search and watchlists working and away to download your news if you want to and you’d have a smash hit.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, Review, News Aggregators

As developers we are driven to build cool products and come up with the latest and greatest. Often though we are under the gun to produce right away right now. We think and come up with answer off the top of our head and boom its done go make it work now. It might not be the most efficient nor the most effective, but it gave a solution.

It’s ok to say, “I will need to research that one. I will get back to you with a solution.” It is a time tested solution for negotiations. Nick Bradbury, of Feed Demon fame, often hashes ideas out in code, just to tear down the idea.

I recently had a reminder of this one myself. A customer has a large client with a 100 locations. Recently two of those locations broke off to become separate entities, but stuck around with my client. The job was to separate the two without loosing on going history and legacy data that had been archived. The answer off the top of my head was, that’s easy create new client files and do an update to tens of thousands of records. While this seems like a straightforward answer, it can be prone with errors.

When I sat down to do the work, I realized that this could possibly be messy. As I was going through the research to get the client Id’s, etc. I realized, hey why not just create two new parent records and move the locations to each of the new parent records respectively. Further, I also saw that I was going to loose the legacy data integrity if I wasn’t careful, so I added copies of the original location records back and changed the link to the legacy data. Done.

By taking the time to come up with a 2nd solution I saved about an hour of work and ensured the integrity of the data.

Sure there will be times that your instincts will come into play, but it will never hurt to think it through/over first.

Technorati Tags: Developer, Development, success, negotiations

I was going to site down and talk about how web sites tend not to remove users or give them an easy way to opt out, like Jeff points out about Linkedin. I also figured it was a good way to start the review process of the next editor in the series, Blog Jet.

I had downloaded it a couple of months ago when I was looking at editors. I had installed it, but never got a chance to use it. You guessed it, when I opened it up this time I got the message your trial period has expired. We are all developers and need to make a living and be compensated for our time. I am not against that at all. I like making a living, but please, please if you are going to use modal’s give me an option out.

There was a lively debate over at Coding Horror about the misuse of modal dialog boxes. This a clear case of such. Not only does it stop the workflow, I get it I need to purchase the application now, but it doesn’t let you escape either. Clicking the ok button launches your browser to their purchase page, as does one of the other links. The other link brings up the registration page. No countdown to let me know it will exit (it never did for me.) and no button to exit. I eventually had to bring up task manager and kill the process.

I am leaning towards not even reviewing the application because of this. What do you think, should I still include it in the review?

Technorati Tags: Design, Usability, Review, Blog Editors, Development, BlogJet