Radical Behavior

These are my links for April 23rd through May 8th:

• Python Stuff -
• Zappos.com Takes Twitter By Storm, Hosts San Francisco Party | -
• RN&R > Local Stories > Surfing without > 04.24.08 - I’m quoted twice. Once as director of business development and the other time as a programmer. I like both titles!
• Alert Thingy 1.3 Released: Single User Interface For Twitter And FriendFeed -
• Ski Alpine Meadows - Client Blog
• Do you want to become a great developer? - Fredrik Normén -

Brilliant

I was introduced to EverNote by my friend Colin. He asked if anyone was interested in a beta invite…mmmmmm, beta invite. I quickly said yes - of course this was via Twitter. Upon first inspection of EverNote, I thought, “great, another scrapbooking application to take notes and place images.” I was ready to pass, but then I noticed its unique element, text recognition.

To put it simply, you can take a picture of anything, and it will make the text in that image searchable. Why do this? Here’s my use case:

My daughter dropped my five year old camera and it broke. Of course, I started the research process on a new one at CNet. I cut and pasted some reviews, prices and notes into EverNote. Then I went to Costco, Best Buy and Target. While there, I took pictures of their price tags - the ones that say the model number, the features, and the price with my iPhone. I emailed the photo to my private EverNote email address. I then was able to open EverNote and search on all the text. I could compare models and prices and which store had which cameras.

I have since taken pictures of articles in magazines, mail that I needed to track, and direct mail that I was interested in. The desktop client for Mac is easy to use and it integrates well with Skitch.

If you want a beta invite, please feel free to comment. I have 9 available.

These are my links for April 3rd through April 22nd:

• Coding time: Subversion visually explained in 30 sec - Nice little visual representation
• The Python Challenge -
• Microsoft Vista Code - Not very nice but funny.
• You Use It Every Day. But Can You Make It Cook? - New York Times -
• Dr. Dobb’s | Identifying Top Developers - Great notes on how to interview and hire developers.

I’m in there twice…both times holding a beer.

In case you haven’t opened a web browser today, Google released a new platform to allow developers to quickly and easily deploy web applications leveraging Googles infrastructure as the back end. The advantages to the developer is they don’t have to worry about the very complicated system architecture issues that usually require a brilliant IT engineer to solve. Instead they can focus on writing the code.

The extreme press coverage is no doubt due to the simple fact that it is Google offering the service. Amazon has had some what similar services for a while and has received a fraction of the press that Google has or will garner over this platform. However, there is still some very important differences about Google’s offering.

1. It’s dead simple. Amazon’s services still require a lot of very technical IT knowledge to utilize. If the video demos of Google’s version are to be believed, the developers need not worry about these system details.
2. It integrates with Google’s account services. This means it’s very easy to build a web application that allows logging in via Google. I’m not sure if this is a pro or a con and I believe only time will tell on this one.
3. It only has support for Python. Sorry PHP and Rails developers. However, they have said they will release other languages after some intial feedback. My money is that PHP will be the first.

So here’s my thoughts. When they open it to PHP, a ton of PHP developers will flock to it. It will be free, or at least very cheap, and much easier to manage then a shared host or a dedicated server. Google will continue to roll out objects/modules that make it easy to integrate with other sites and services, and since it will be on the Google infrastructure, it will be easier for Google to aquire the popular apps and integrate them into their services.

So who wins?

Google does because it means more page inventory that they can sell advertising on. More data in their database that they can organize and present in different ways. More adoption of their technologies like GFS and Big Table.

Developers do because it means scalability and rock bottom costs. It means a farm system for exit strategies. It means feeling like you are “part of Google” without being employed there.

Who do you think wins?

The waterfall software development model is the traditional process used by developers to create software - I include web application development into the category of software. It’s been around as an accepted methodology since the 70’s. It basically consists of:

1. Requirements Gathering
2. Design Phase
3. Implementation Phase
4. Verification Phase
5. Maintenance Phase

Presumably at each phase of the project, there are sign offs and reviews with the stakeholders, the end users of the software. Sometimes you’ll hear phase 3 referred to as the big bang phase. This is because after phase 1 & 2 are complete, the developer(s) goes off for a period of time, codes the application and bang, delivers it for phase 4. In fact, most the time, phase 3 is going to be the longest phase (not counting continued maintenance).

This is exactly why the waterfall method sucks. The developer - and other team members - better hope they ask a cubic ton of questions in phase 1 and can accurately convey the project in phase 2. They also better hope that the stakeholders know exactly what they want. Because if not, phase 4 is going to put developers in an agitated state. In my experience, most stakeholders only have a slight idea of what they want. They aren’t techies and can’t tell you with 100% confidence if they want their software to bake bread or make toast - subtle difference right?

So you’re team rolls into phase 4 and the stakeholders are like, “OMG! WTF?” And you’re like, “What?! It does what you wanted. Don’t you remember us going over it when we showed you those diagrams and schemas?” And they’re still like, “OMG! WTF?”

This is why the iterative approach - sometimes referred to as agile development - has become so popular. It allows developers to use rapid application development (RAD) to prototype software.  So there is never a “surprise, here it is” moment. Instead the stakeholder moves down the process with you taking ownership into the final product. It’s some what similar to the creative design process, but for geeks.

Word of warning though, don’t expect developers to jump on this model though. They tend to prefer having a set of specs, sitting down and coding to those, and then moving on. They may see iterations and undocumented changes as something bad.

Anyway, not writing a book here. Let me know your experiences with software development. Do you prefer agile interative development or waterfall development?

These are my links for February 14th through April 2nd:

• FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin - Development on a Shoestring -
• Fold-Ins, Past and Present - The New York Times -
• Google Code for Educators -
• Ryan Jerz :: Reno Blogger, Reno Blog >> The Terri Patraw Experience: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (allegedly) - Good example of blogger integrity in the face of threatening lawsuits
• Little Einsteins: Race for Space DVD Giveaway - My first giveaway on disneyfrontier.com

I’ve reviewed a few programming frameworks on this site: Ruby on Rails, Django and CakePHP. I think learning each one has made me pretty adept at quickly picking up a new framework and trying it out. So, when our development team decided they were standardizing on Zend, I thought I should put it to the Kenzer test.

I know that I said I was intent on never programming in PHP again, but that’s what our company uses and that’s what Wordpress is written in. 

When I reviewed CakePHP, the Zend Framework was very young (I think it was like version 0.6). It’s now in version 1.5 and very capable. It has all the Model-View-Controller (MVC) components as well as a plethora of web services libraries that were very easy to implement. In just a few hours, I took the YouTube library and created a topic specific video browser on my other blog. The documentation was good and there is plenty of community support.

I like how it stores the core code of your application out of the path of what is publicly browsable. It gives it a more clean secure feel. I also like that installation basically consists of copy one directory to your web server - however, it only runs on PHP 5. Caching in the Zend Framework is just a few lines of code, making it a no brainer when it comes to web services.

It does have a few trade offs. It doesn’t have scaffolding or auto form creation like the other’s have. It’s newly implemented Forms library is a little cumbersome. It’s database support, while varied, feels less than integrated.

I think all in all, it’s a great framework. I haven’t touched Cake since 1.1, so I can’t compare it to their current version. I would recommend it to any PHP developer. If you are interested, check out Killer PHP’s tutorials.

Anyone compared it to the latest version of CakePHP? Any new PHP frameworks out there that rock and roll?

I posted the actual plugin as a zip file. I’m not sure why my request to wordpress extend for SVN access went unanswered.

Copy Categories to Tags - The Plugin