NYCPHP Meetup

[CHUN-YIU LAM]

This story remind me of me ;-)






----Original Message Follows----
From: max goldberg <max at idsociety.com>
Reply-To: talk at nyphp.org
To: NYPHP Talk <talk at nyphp.org>
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] [JOB] PT Junior Developer, Manhattan
Date: Mon,  9 Dec 2002 14:02:46 -0500
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FILETIME=[5DB08C60:01C29FBA]

Well I think you said what I was trying to say a bit better.
I'm not really hard on people for using a " on a static string
rather than a ', but I would like to know they actually know
the difference in how they are parsed. I just feel like more senior
developers do write better code, not only does it work, but it takes
into account a great deal of future expansion, it is usually well
documented and there is usually a lot of good forethought put into it.

A long while ago at a job I was forced into a bunch of standards by the
lead developer, which at the time I hated. I didn't see any use for them
until I got a new job, and was forced to fix an amazing amount of really
unorganized hacks. At this point I fully understood the need for fully
commented, peer evaluated code that fit a style guide. Also at this job
the lead developer ignored a good amount of my questions, causing me to
seek out the answer on my own, via documentation or trial and error.

I think it helped me greatly. I wish some of the people I worked with
had the initiative to teach themselves some things without needing to
have someone walk them through the most basic parse errors.

I don't think that document has many uses from a professional
standpoint, but I did understand his frustration and I did find the
humor in it, regardless of if I agree with all of his points. =)

-max

Adam Fields wrote:
 > On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:55:22AM -0500, max goldberg wrote:
 > [...]
 >
 >>I think to truly be qualified you need to understand many things beyond
 >>syntax, which most people don't get. It seems no one even writes code
 >>for high performance and low resource usage any more. Everyone needs
 >>their hand held through the most basic of exercises. I'm not sure if
 >>it's just my opinion and current situation, it just seems like a lot
 >>of people who make a living of programming/scripting web applications
 >>have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
 >
 >
 > You make a number of assertions here, which are not necessarily
 > related:
 >
 > 1) People write inefficient code.
 >
 > Yes, that's true. But high-performance/low resource usage isn't always
 > the best thing. What if making your code highly tuned takes you three
 > times as long and makes the code completely incomprehensible to anyone
 > who comes along after you? Like everything else, efficiency is a
 > trade-off for other things. The problem isn't that people write
 > inefficient code, it's that they don't know the difference. Much of
 > "web scripting" is written in a RAD environment and should be written
 > in such a way that it's fast to code, fast to replace when the
 > functionality changes, and easy to read. This is not to say that
 > efficiency should be ignored, but making every last component perform
 > at its optimum is probably a waste of valuable developer time that
 > could be better spent on other things (such as writing better comments
 > and documentation).
 >
 > 2) People don't know what they're doing.
 >
 > There is a difference between a junior developer and a senior
 > architect. Similarly, there's a difference between somone who picked
 > up the PHP-in-24 hours book last week and someone who's deployed
 > dozens of successful projects. If you're hiring, and you don't know
 > the difference, your project isn't going to succeed if you're doing
 > anything remotely complicated. Junior developers have a valuable place
 > on a development team, but when they're in charge of the development
 > effort (or solo), it's only natural that their lack of experience is
 > going to show up in the final product.
 >
 >
 >>I read a good rant which made a lot of sense to me at
 >>http://m.bacarella.com/papers/secsoft/html/
 >
 >
 > There are some good points there, certainly, although most of that is
 > aimed at admins and systems programmers. A lot of it is just
 > frustrated ranting that is amusing but not productive.
 >



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