www.hardcoded.nl Less = more

As always we write code and as soon as the dust settles in, our code seems to fade away into nothingness and you forget about it right until the moment the code decides to slap you in the face by grinding your server to an halt. After a quick inspection, the server load tells it's story. You'll find a few processes eating away most IO, Mem and Proc resources.

Recently I've left a very nice web Development company, located near my home town. I love the company even though they're using ASP.net and all those closed source Microsoft tools I so sincerely like! Don't get me wrong, most off my live I've been working with open source ... but development always has come easily with the tools Microsoft provides.

It's a breeze to work with VCS, DBMS and integrate them with their well written tools.

The internet is filled with flamewars, trolls and stories on how to become great. Most linkedin users, forum abusers and casual readers have seen questions such as

• how to become a great developer
• how to get famous
• starting a million dollar company
• how to become a skilled influencer
• ...

Let me ask you, are you familiar with the this ?

IT-Management needs a Life Cycle Budget report. One of your colleagues get the assignment to deliver a comprehensive report. So the first step is to create a mega download from the company's ERP system.

About a year ago, during my trip to Paris and Barcelona, I read Refactoring; improving the design of existing code. As it happens I like the way Martin Fowler writes his books and explains his ideas. I won't always agree with the guy but he has some pretty nifty insights.

I've been know to write code that ain't readable, don't we all love one liners that do all the heavy lifting and never fail? Well I do, coding in this way means almost always writing indecipherable code.

A few weeks ago a colleague came to me with the remark: "Say you're pretty good at Excel and Access, is it not ?". Oh well, I can handle quite reasonably my things with Office. Why are you asking ?", I asked the man just to show some interest. At that time, I did what I do best; drinking coffee.

After several years of PHP programming; using several different frameworks from home-grown till CodeIgniter and Zend, I changed to developing with C# and a bit Java. A nice change, the syntax sugar provided by both languages is great!

I've been using Drupal for a while now and as a developer there are a few things I really dislike in the 6.x distributions.

With Powershell, it's easy to program your Windows Commandline. The Powershell gives incredible power to those Windows powerusers that know how to manipulate it well. A few weeks ago, I wrote a minor scriplet that returns me the current ip-address in use. A rather hard thing to do, when you only have a mouse and the dialog box left.

Unit Testing is the way to roll nowadays, so after a few years of lacking behind on the unit testing part I decided to catch up and use it properly with Drupal. It's fairly easy to install the basics, just download the stable simpletest module. Extract the archive and copy it to your favorite directory. (in my case it's sites/default/modules/contrib)