programming | justin hileman dot info

posted by justin hileman 1 year, 6 days ago

Skimping on free soft drinks, a completely standard benefit at most high tech companies, is a great way to send your employees and potential employees the message that you just don't care about being an attractive workplace.

In a classic piece, Joel takes on misconceptions about employee perks, programmer productivity and getting in "the flow". This is a great (re)read brought to you via commenter nomalab.

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posted by justin hileman 1 year, 1 month ago

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

I've never been a meeting person. Paul Graham's latest essay helps give me words to explain why.

(Via @popthestack)

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posted by justin hileman 1 year, 6 months ago

Converting to git-svn: A Collection of Links

While it's a long read, I think An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters is the best place to start. As an SVK user, it helped smooth the transition from my SVK-based commits to Subversion into my newfound git-svn-based Subversion workflow.
GitTips is an über-useful collection of tips. About git. Imagine that. Some of my favorites include "how to use git branches with git svn", and "how to fix the most recent commit".
Toolman Tim's Setting up a new remote git repository article gets you going fast. It has a couple of "for the impatient" sections: enough to get the gist, enough to remind you what the command is called. And brief enough to keep my attention.
Jim Lindley has a well-commented and fairly solid git-svn workflow. It's not what ended up working for me, but it helped me get there.
For me, Ben Lynn's Git Magic sealed the deal. It showed me how git accomplishes everything I love from SVK, everything SVN does well, and a whole lot more awesome. Be sure to check out chapter four, Branch Wizardry.
Jaisen Mathai covers getting your git environment set up for on OS X. Basically you can copy and paste every code block on the page into your terminal. Except the first step. You really don't want the MacPorts git install. Use this one instead.
While you're downloading things, be sure to get GitNub and Gitx. They're both cool, but I haven't used them long enough to form a solid preference.

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posted by justin hileman 1 year, 8 months ago

When you struggle with an OOP problem, your program still works, it's just sort of hard to maintain. Allegedly. But when you struggle with pointers, your program produces the line Segmentation Fault and you have no idea what's going on, until you stop and take a deep breath and really try to force your mind to work at two different levels of abstraction simultaneously.

Joel Spolsky on the perils of JavaSchools.

It feels a bit like grandpa complaining about walking to school barefoot, uphill both ways, but it's a good read.

Maybe I'm getting old and senile too :)

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posted by justin hileman 2 years, 8 months ago

I don't know if JavaScript 2 (aka ECMAScript Edition 4) is going to be the Next Big Language, but it's certainly going to be a Next Big Language.

Steve Yegge, on the future of an underrated language.

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programming

posted by justin hileman 3 years, 1 week ago

Snippet of the day: Trim a string (the smart way) with PHP

I reworked the feed reading signature images I made a while back and added something to trim the strings to a decent length without breaking words. So here you go. A one-liner that will trim a string to a decent length, and break it on whitespace:

if (strlen($blog_title) > 35) $blog_title =
array_shift(explode("|||", wordwrap($blog_title,
35, "|||"))) . "...";

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posted by justin hileman 3 years, 6 months ago

feature creep == sleep deprivation

I worked on a project a while back that never quite solidified into a clear design plan or development goals. This was my first real experience with "feature creep," or the tendency of a project to increase in scope and requirements beyond those originally foreseen. In this case, we were making changes to the project requirements up to the day before the product was released. Feature creep delayed the release by several weeks. Feature creep cost me six consecutive nights of sleep.

The result was far from desirable. The final project was somewhat patchwork—because it lacked proper planning, it grew one ad-hoc step at a time. The interface wasn't nearly as intuitive as the original design. Proper planning would have resulted in a cleaner, more elegant design. Proper planning would have ensured that the product launched on time. Proper planning would have saved the project. Lesson learned.

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