Download - Resisting The Feature Creature
Resisting the feature creature
Christian Heilmann
Geek Meet, Romania, November 2008
We are developers.
I useVI!
And as developers we have one thing that always keeps us from making our lives a
*lot* easier.
The feature creature
Creature:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salacious_B._Crumb
The feature creature is that little advisor we have in our
head...
...who gives us bad ideas.
Like, what?
“You can do that in 5 lines of code – after all you don’t
need to test before you apply nowadays”
“Documentation is for pussies, real men learn from
source code”
“JavaScript sucks, just write a wrapper that generates
JavaScript from Ruby and translates via Python”
“Go ahead and add that hack. It only has to work in IE6
anyways.”
“Comments in your own language make a lot of sense.
If you use English, who’d know where code ends and
the comment starts?”
“Yeah, Yahoo and Google have a solution for this, but
you are better and can create a smaller one!”
All of this stuff is very dangerous.
Right now, the market is going
downhill...
...which means that the quality of your work is
measured by how fast and efficient you are.
I’ve given a talk about this some weeks ago in Paris.
http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/working-in-the-now-presentation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lejoe/3035690503/
Where I showed people how to save time and money by
using things that are available for free.
Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
Page widgets (things not in HTML): YUI, jQuery UI
Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
YouTube API
Amazon S3 for storage
Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
Mechanical Turk
http://www.wait-till-i.com/2008/11/14/paris-web-working-in-the-now/
Basically this could be the same talk...
...but this is more about the underlying issue...
...of us as developers not trusting other people’s
solutions.
We all work on solving the same problems.
And some of us solve problems for large, distributed teams.
In large corporations.
Or even for a massive audience.
And yet as developers we tend not to trust solutions of
those companies.
Building web applications and web sites is much more
than coding a solution.
It means working in a constantly changing
environment.
Constantly under attack by hackers and spammers.
Collaboratively fixing these problems and releasing
patches and new versions are a solution for that problem.
Do you have the time and dedication to do the same for
all of your hand-rolled solutions?
I have written a massive amount of bad code in my
life.
I also find myself doing work that in retrospect doesn’t
make much sense or is available as a native method.
The point is that as a developer I act first and then start reading the instructions.
This, I found, holds me back.
SDKs and documentation are built for a reason.
They make the access to systems and building
software on top of them much easier.
Case in point.
Say you want to help your clients find good keywords to promote their product online.
You can do some research, surf all the competitors’ sites
and note down the descriptions, keywords and
titles.
You can be a man and use CURL to write a script to do
that.
Or you can keep your eyes open and check if there is an
API for that.
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&appid=...
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&view=keyterms&appid=...
All you need to do is getting the top 20, analyzing the keyword frequency and
create a top 20.
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/11/boss_keywords.html
Then you take YUI CSS grids, and spend 30 minutes playing
with colours and fonts.
So in essence, what I am saying is...
There is a *lot* of *awesome* *free* and
*good* stuff out on the web.
Spend some time reading up on it and using it.
People like me spend a lot of time convincing people in big
companies that giving free access to our systems is a
great thing...
...to help developers and small companies become a
success by not having to repeat the same mistakes we
did.
Our main argument for all these free goodies is that gifted people like you will
create things faster and better.
Because you are not hindered by a big corporate machine
and red tape.
So help us show the system that innovation works outside
if the inside helps the community.
Creature:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salacious_B._Crumb
Christian Heilmann
http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org
http://twitter.com/codepo8
THANKS!
