The Etiquette Of Programming

You might be a smart developer. You might be someone who gets things done. Unless you’re a lone programmer working in your bedroom though, that’s not enough. Collaborating and cooperating with your teammates is vital to keeping your project moving forwards and to ensure it’s extendable and maintainable.

In this series I’m going to talk about how small changes to your coding style, small changes to your communication and small changes to your working practices can make a huge difference to those you’re working with. A lot of these tips are common sense, some of them you’ll already know, but hopefully some of them will make you think and might make your life easier.

If you’re fresh out of university and joining a team of programmers with 30 years experience then you will probably get there and think “WTF!” about some aspect of their working practices. Most of what you read about programming is of the “here’s a shiny new toy” variety. If you immediately started using everything you read about not only would you probably go insane but you’d also annoy your coworkers immensely.

Working in Django, finally!

For the past day and a half I have been building a website in Django rather than the C++ that is the bulk of my day job.

It’s so easy, it makes me sad that I have to go back to C++ this afternoon.

I’ve also discovered that aggregation, the main feature I want from django, will be committed to trunk tomorrow. Hurrah!

iPhone podcast gripes

I’ve been using my iPhone for two weeks now, and overall it’s great. Easily the best phone I’ve ever used. It really has changed the way I live my life because there is so much I can now do from anywhere that before I’d need to be at my computer for.

Despite this though, there are a few things that Apple should fix.

1. There’s no character count when typing a text message. This might be a small issue and given I get 500 free texts a month (which is way more than I use) it doesn’t matter that I might sometimes send people two messages. However, it would be nice to be able tailor my messages to the limit of 160 characters.
2. The new over-the-air download of podcasts is completely broken.

Rather than listen to my music on a loop while I travel I listen to a number of podcasts, and Steve Lamacq’s 6music show. MythTV on my PC records his show every afternoon. A script then converts the recording into a 300MB MP3 file and updates the xml document that describes it as a podcast. This is served by Apache on my local machine.

Compiling CSS

A new compiler called HSS has been released. This tool makes it easier to write concise, maintainable and valid CSS. The two key features are the ability to define variables which are then replaced throughout the file, and to create nested blocks.

Typically you’ll need to write code like this:

.faq {
    color: red;
}
.faq h1 {
    background-color: black;
}
.faq a {
    text-decoration: none;
}

With HSS you can write…

.faq {
    color: red;
    h1 { background-color: black; }
    a { text-decoration: none; }
}

Since you’ll want to automatically run a code minimiser over your CSS code anyway, running HSS as well shouldn’t be a problem.

Unfortunately the tool is written in the little known language Neko (which is a language created by the author of HSS) and is not hosted on any of the of many open source project hosting sites which would help ensure the tool lives on even if the author moves on. Indeed, it’s not even clear from the website what license the tool is released on. These are problems that might need to be solved before it’s worth basing a project around HSS.

New Flickr Home Page

Flickr are in the process of testing a new style home page for logged in users. The process of switching is pretty fancy, once you click ok the old page fades out and is replaced by the flickr throbber which floats down the screen like snow flakes.

The new page is not really that different to the old page, but it does have slightly more information on it. I’m not quite sure what the point of the redesign was - it was nowhere near as dramatic as Facebook or Last.fm’s recent revamps.

Flickr’s website has changed little over the past year so it’s nice to see that the website won’t stagnate, and that new features are being added.