Comments on: Lessons from the LAMP generation – tilllate.com

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:36:54 +0000

But a final Catch-22 came up with Silvan’s last slide—”Looking back, what could we have done better?”, under which one point was to the effect of “Employ better development practices, OOP etc.”. To which Lukas Smith (who’s now a citizen of Zürich) replied—”If you had, you probably would have failed—months developing something J2EE-a-like which, when released, falls flat on the users and is too rigid to incorporate their feedback”.

Good practices can speed up the dev process quite a lot. Ruby on Rails encourages a structured approach, where the use of convention, modules etc aids development speed. RoR is the antithesis of J2EE – dismissing OO and best habits is just a lazy response.

By: redbone

redbone — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 15:20:04 +0000

It’s hard to find good PHP coders because the pay is crap. When every Tom, Dick and Harry can knock up basic spaghetti code*, the market is saturated and less appealing to the skilled hacker.

By: HardCoded

HardCoded — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:13:15 +0000

Totally agree with the sentiment. Rough things in and get it out there. You can (and probably will) refactor countless times, as you learn what is popular, what needs to scale, what doesn’t work very well at all. I’d say the most important planning is in the database and in logging. That’s what will give you the biggest headaches when you make major revisions. Do that right and you can switch code and even languages with relative ease.

By: dev_cw

dev_cw — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 09:41:11 +0000

I agree to a point. I have a ‘do it right the first time’ mind frame, this is great for working on client projects however my personal ideas get stumped since I spend way too much planning rather than just getting the darn thing out there and see if it works. If it stirs up some interest and you are happy then it will be fun to fix it up (after all is this not the way that MS works). Also if you have a full time job and you work on your personal project between jobs it is very likely that it will end up a forgotten directory on you ‘to do’ files after much planning…and you will never know if it could have worked.

I wonder how much planning went into Google or Yahoo before they started?

By: Lukas Smith

Lukas Smith — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:53:43 +0000

My point was that careful planning takes time. And in the beginning you just need to get your idea out there so that people can play around with it. That is the only way to learn what the users really want. If you start up with 6 months of initial planning and development you have lost your momentum. More importantly after those 6 months you will be mightily pissed when the users tell you they want something slightly different. If you hacked up the stuff in a few hours, you are much more willing to adapt quickly, rather than hoping for the users to adapt to you.

By: silvanm

silvanm — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:08:03 +0000

Yep, we are looking for talented developers with strong PHP skills... I promise: The job does not consist of maintaining our old smelly code... You're going to develop cool new high-tech features for our portal...

By: HarryF

HarryF — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:07:16 +0000

As for the lack of PHP talent in Zürich, if someone has a job for me I would seriously consider moving there. So, who’s hiring?

Well here's one for starters - let me get back on that - think we need to set something up plus I should be careful what I say.

By: Etnu

Etnu — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:38:59 +0000

Writing code is easy, rewriting (or maintaining) is painful.

That does NOT mean that the solution is to write “more maintainable” code. It’s not POSSIBLE to write easily maintained code, no matter what they may have taught you in school.

Your best bet is to write code that’s very modular so that you can completely replace things as necessary. Yes, that’s right — just replace them. Don’t screw around trying to fix old, broken code. You’re a website. You have no “backwards compatibility” issues to worry about. Rebuild it later.

By: Ray Oliver

Ray Oliver — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:59:26 +0000

While employing these so-called “best practices” and plenty of OO code certainly means longer development times, it also means less headaches down the road. I don’t take issue with disregarding such practices and throwing together an application quickly, but you should always plan on “fixing” it down the road.

I also don’t agree that employing best practices and OO makes an application “too rigid to incorporate [user] feedback” – at least not if done correctly. I would much rather work on a well structured OO project than on some haphazard jumble of code. In the past I’ve found it much easier to add functionality to the former rather than the latter.

As for the lack of PHP talent in Zürich, if someone has a job for me I would seriously consider moving there. So, who’s hiring?

By: mrsmiley

mrsmiley — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:13:48 +0000

Obviously not in Zurich :) Otherwise the ones that are there are happily employed doing what they are doing.