Oct 17, 2013 Posted by John MacIntyre

I’m a good dev

2 recent experiences Earlier this year I had 2 experiences which made me pause & reflect: The first was an outsourcing company’s framework from hell.  The framework was made to make MVC work like webforms … I kid you not.  I suspect they had a webforms framework and were trying to hold on to their previous productivity gains by jamming their square peg into the MVC paradigm’s round hole.  The end result was an undocumented, inconsistent, buggy mess that only an experienced developer can figure out; ironically it’s the kind of mess an experienced developer would know enough to stay away from.  (Although I didn’t) Fine.  Whatever.  We all make mistakes right? But I did find the video on their website talking about how “good high quality code” “pays dividends down the road when you’re trying to add features” and how it “enables you to have high performance applications” a little nauseating, especially while fixing errors around Sql Server’s 2,100 parameter limitation.  Turns out they were querying ids matching their filter, passing the results back to .NET, and then passing those ids back into a second query.  There was a bunch of rookie mistakes like that which hardly enabled ‘high performance applications’. The second was when a friend asked me to add OSCommerce to his brand new brochure website.  No problem, but I was shocked that the guy who wrote the brochure website (this year … in 2013) did it in Classic ASP.  .. wait. wuht?  Yes, somebody wrote a brand new app in a technology which was obsoleted in 2001.  Don’t get me wrong, if they did this in 2001, 2002, or even 2003 because they didn’t want to work in the ‘untested’ new .net technology, I would understand, I’m rather risk adverse myself. … but it’s been 12 years. I think we’re ok. Since they were moving to OSCommerce which is written in PHP, their ability to find hosting which has both PHP and Classic ASP might be limited, and it would be so easy to port a Classic ASP brochure site to PHP, I just ported it.  The original Classic ASP code was good code, it was clean, easy to read, and used appropriate best practices … but how good is your code when it’s obsolete 12 years before it’s written?  Well from what I hear, the original developer didn’t think my decision to move to PHP was a great idea and questioned my competence. I’m... read more

Nov 24, 2010 Posted by John MacIntyre

Response to Seth Godin’s – Where do ideas come from?

Seth Godin is wrong I just read Seth Godin’s blog post Where do ideas come from? And in my opinion he completely missed it. Sorry, I think Seth is awesome as do many others, but on this one, I don’t think he really answered the question; where do ideas come from?  Instead, in my opinion, what he wrote was more a list of favourable conditions While I’m no Seth Godin, I’m going to share my understanding of ideas and their source[1]. I hope I don’t need to explain why a post about ideas and creativity is on a programming blog. Ideas come from questions Ideas are answers to those questions. Although it may appear that ideas come out of nowhere while driving to work or zoning out in the shower, they are really answering previously asked questions burning in your subconscious.  There are many conditions which help answers come more easily, but they never come if you don’t have the question in the first place. Questions need to be installed into your subconscious A fleeting question doesn’t quite make it into your subconscious to be answered later.  The question needs to be important enough to be prioritized by your mind. Installations depth comes from emotion The importance of the question is largely based on the intensity of the emotion driving the question.  That’s why many innovations come during massive change and crisis.  Fear and greed inspire many ideas. New information is assimilated to answer these questions New questions are never installed for questions you already have the information needed to answer it.  So you need more information to answer the question and will need time to assimilate new information which is filtered against your question. This information can be from; feedback from action, random thoughts in the shower, synergy, social media, blogs, news, conversations, books, radio, lectures, etc…  And yes, Seth even television[2] Fear constrains ideas Fear eliminates ideas.  Whether criticism of a bad idea, or constraint, or even a well-meaning, ‘helpful’ person who’s experienced proves it cannot be done. When people fear criticism, ideas are never put forth which may inspire better ideas.  All ideas must be valued for an innovative environment. Forcing ideas constrains you to existing information You’ll hear many people say that you sit down, brainstorm, make your decisions quickly and take immediate action, which is great, when you have all the information you need.  But unless you have all the information you need, forcing... read more

Oct 3, 2010 Posted by John MacIntyre

The UI programmers (not so) secret weapon

An Example: Suppose you had software which matches buyers and sellers, and new users are created via a ‘new user’ wizard[1].  Let’s say the wizard has 4 pages for Basic User Info, Review, Processing, and Completion Status Report.  And there are 5 buttons; Cancel, Previous, Next, Run, and Finish. Cancel is displayed from the Basic User Info, Review, and Processing pages. Previous is displayed from the Review page. Next is displayed from the Basic User Info page. Run is displayed from the Review page. Finish is displayed from the Completion Status Report page. This isn’t difficult to manage the display from the events[2] right? Well … in reality, it doesn’t take much of a change for your simple display functionality to become … The Problem Manipulating application display during events quickly turns into a complex, bug riddled, difficult to maintain, mess. It may not seem like that big of a deal when you have only a few controls and a very simple (or no) workflow.  Actually, you may argue, managing visual display in the events may even seem like the most efficient strategy.  After all, you will never display, disable, or otherwise needlessly manipulate a control, but as your application grows more complex, this approach can leave you tearing your hair out[3].  This is especially true when you have multiple execution paths leading to the same event handlers with different state. What if you received a change request for the above requirements, where additional info is required for buyers or sellers, resulting in a new wizard page for each, and in addition to that, business sellers require a page to gather Tax Information? Your complexity has started to grow, resulting in buyers have a workflow of Basic User Info -> Buyer Info -> Review -> Processing -> Completion Status Report Individual sellers have a workflow of Basic User Info -> Individual Seller Info -> Review -> Processing -> Completion Status Report And commercial sellers have a workflow of Basic User Info -> Commercial Seller Info -> Tax Info -> Review -> Processing -> Completion Status Report Notice how these changes lead to different execution paths all arriving at the Review page.  The question then, is; where does the back button on the Review page send the user?  The back button requires logic to know which wizard page to display. It’s not difficult to imagine the need for logic to be added in more than one place[4], which can result... read more

Sep 19, 2010 Posted by John MacIntyre

My week (09/18/2010)

Blog Posts Earlier this week I posted What is too simple and small to refactor? about a  follow up to my first Clean Code experience where I took a very small function, and refactored it.  In the end I was truly questioning; how small is too small to refactor?  This post received quite a bit of a response, including a response from Uncle Bob Martin and several refactors from Cliff Mees, Neal Blomfield (his response), Cory Fowler,  Ben Alabaster begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, and even Jon Skeet. My Twitter Worth Mentioning(?) “..I’d explain why, but I have to, like, go put on lipstick.”-@aalear responding to a comment “females are too busy being beautiful” #gogirl 8:25 PM Sep 15th My recent blog posts have generated a lot of feedback among my friends & colleagues. I’m glad. It’s a great conversation. 12:09 AM Sep 15th I’m going to create a restaurant review site & call it StickyTables.com 12:51 PM Sep 13th “Clean Code is a design philosophy more than a naming convention.” – me #justQuotedMyself #dealWithIt 😉 12:36 PM Sep 13th If somebody says my code sucks & they’ll redo it, I’d be hurt. But for my design, I’m relieved. #msPaintSucks 😉 10:56 AM Sep 13th Just saw a really cool job title on LinkedIn “Experienced Code Poet” 11:04 PM Sep 12th When I hear “the cloud” I know I no longer understand what the other person is talking about. #widelyMisusedTerm 9:58 PM Sep 12th Friday; I love you, but you come way too fast. #in 7:12 AM Sep 17th Even when they score a major coup to attract & add value to users, the announcement is littered with comments like “Who uses @MySpace? ” 11:16 AM Sep 16th Got to say; one of the biggest challenges I have blogging is coming up /w relevant examples. 8:17 AM Sep 16th #FF @unclebobmartin not for his Clean Code msg, which is awesome, but for addressing your questions & concerns. #wayToGo about 19 hours ago A programmer started to cuss Cause getting 2 sleep was a fuss As he lay there in bed Looping round in his head Was while(!asleep()) sheep++; 9:13 PM Sep 8th (this wasn’t mine, it was quoted from a StackOverflow question) In my opinion ‘no written requirements’ is the biggest kiss of death a project can have. #stackexchange http://bit.ly/d3rho2 5:42 PM Sep 8th I don’t hate technical buzzwords, only the ones non-tech people have hijacked. 4:17 PM Sep 16th Wisdom from Twitter... read more

Jul 23, 2010 Posted by John MacIntyre

Let’s turn off all features to improve UX

Here’s a thought; what if all features on a new software upgrade were turned off by default? What if when you bought a software upgrade, all the new features were disabled and the software worked exactly as if it did before you installed it? What if new software had all but the most structurally necessary features disabled? Yes, I’m serious. But why? For a maximum user experience of course … WTF? … how can you have a maximum user experience with everything turned off? Because the biggest issue with user experience is surprises. Well duh! But now we’re talking bugs, and everybody knows bugs suck. Yeah, bugs suck, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about features that work to spec, but unfortunately the user doesn’t even know exist! Notice that I’m not talking about features that users don’t know how to use. I’m talking specifically about features, often intrusive features, which the user doesn’t know about. Like what? … oh, I don’t know … like having my keyboard cycling between US, Canadian French, and Canadian Multilingual, in an apparently random pattern last week. This happened because the default hot keys on the Language Bar software were set to the same keys as is standard for highlighting text for cut & pasting. This took me days to figure out, for a variety of reasons, the biggest being that, the change is not obvious until I type a letter that has a different mapping, turning my your single quotes ‘, into “ or è! I was completely oblivious to the fact that utility even had keyboard shortcuts, as I’m sure the person who selected those keys was oblivious to the fact they are standard shortcuts. This was extremely frustrating, and notice it was not a bug. The problem is that things did not work as expected. Unfortunately, when the user doesn’t know ‘about’, let alone ‘how to use’, all the funky bells & whistles we added to improve their lives, their experience more closely resembles a series of surprises. And surprises suck … oh yes they do suck. I’m not talking “Ed McMahon showing up on your door step” surprises, I’m talking “your meeting starts in 5 minutes, and the printer doesn’t work, and when you reboot, a large Windows Update starts installing” surprises. Surprises are frustrating and unproductive. So why the surprises? Because users are diving into the software to get stuff done, and don’t have the... read more

Jul 12, 2010 Posted by John MacIntyre

New Job

New job I’m starting at a new job this morning.  I’ve been looking since April. Well sort of; it took me a long time to accept the fact that full time might be the best choice for me at this point in my life. But once I accepted that, I went straight to Infusion Development and got in their interview process.  I’ve known about Infusion since about 2006 via their ads on DotNetRocks. As I understood, they’ve been growing super fast, have reputation for having bright developers, & a bleeding edge development strategy.  For example, Infusion is a leading developer of Microsoft Surface apps … If you’re reading this, I’m sure you know about Surface already, but if you don’t, go to Google Video and do a search on it.  It’s an awesome product. I won’t be working on the Surface though. I really want to work in ASP.NET MVC / jQuery, and that’s what I’ll be doing.  I’ve wanted to work at Infusion for a long time, but didn’t act on it since I had a pretty good thing going as an independent consultant. But when my contract ended in April, a bit of soul searching led me to the conclusion that I needed to push my career to another level, and this might be the best strategy. As I understand it, Infusion has over 100 developers in their Toronto offices. If you’ve ever looked my Twitter feed, you know I like talking to smart developers. So, yeah, I’ll be in heaven.  🙂 One thing I’ve noticed since I started looking for a job is that I seem to have missed an important exit in my career. Nobody looks for developers with more than 10 years experience. It seems that after 10 years most dev’s have moved to management or architecture, which makes sense, but as a ‘do it all’ independent consultant, I never made that distinctive leap. I made more of a indistinctive transition. Based on conversations during interviews, I got the impression they would like to see me pursue a move to architect and will help me do it. So that’s nice … Assuming I did interpret that correctly.  Infusion also has a wickedly awesome intensive training program as well, where you do intensive, 8 hours a day, in house, until you learn the new technologies.  I believe they even have their own training team. Freakin awesome!   The HR lady was happy when I expressed... read more

Mar 26, 2009 Posted by John MacIntyre

Outsourcing Dilemma

I’d love to be able to outsource, but in the dynamic world of software development, the person you outsource to needs to be proactively thinking about all situations, they need context, and be focused on quality. And quite frankly, …

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