L-P Huberdeau

Sun has been shining for the past few days, I’m listening to some of the bands I was listening back when summer was all about vaccations. Some things change. I started a summer term two weeks ago after a very short break and my part time job is starting to look like a full time position. I’ve been so busy I didn’t even take a few minutes to write here in over a month.

Here are a few random ideas to remind myself I didn’t completely stop thinking.

• Some people just don’t know how to use version control tools.

  I thought software development professionals who don’t know how to use version control tools were long gone. I was wrong. The situation is actually worst than that. Some don’t even know what they are and what setting up a proper development environment was. A few weeks, while reading Software Configuration Management Patterns, I thought some of the discussions were extremely basic. My first thought was that the book was published in 2002, so it might have been discussing about some of the rare few specimens. Plus, the authors might have been telling legendary tales of the early 90’s.

  I was wrong.

  Some developers really are not using version control tools and actually develop on live servers. Of course this implies messing up my code and wasting my time. The worst part is that they actually don’t admit that they don’t know how to use the tool instead of asking for help.

• Changing host is never easy

  Some of you might have noticed I moved my blog. I just had too many passwords to remember for hosts all around, so I moved everything to the same location and moved my blog to blog.lphuberdeau.com. Hopefully, all links are still valid.

  I wanted the change to be seemless. Of course, I failed as by the time the domain transfer propagated to my house, some users actually felt the change and a configuration was wrong. I like the reliability of my new host and the good service, but the configuration tools are way too complicated to use. Setting up a domain actually requires configurations at 3 or 4 different places.

• Microsoft development tools are hard to get to work

  Since I got out of college, I had never touched a single tool from Visual Studio. Now in the same week, I had to do it twice. Why is it so hard to get the compiler to find all the libraries it needs? Why can’t I just type make and see everything compiling? Why do I have to navigate in menus and option panels to add options that are more cryptic than those on the command line? Why do those Windows developers complain that GNU/Linux is complicated anyway?

  The down side of all this is that I will have to get used to this for a few weeks. At least, until the integration of some COTS application is integrated and deployed.

• The Zend Framework’s documentation is great

  Since my last experience on a live project with the Framework was so great, I decided to move forward with it for an other one. This time, most of the components were actually in the core, so I used more of them. The documentation is simply excellent and it’s probably the primary reason why the framework will be successful in the future. It was done right from the start and it’s not getting updated and improved as the official release is getting closer.

  I’ve used the Zend_View component for the first time (previous project didn’t need any of it). With the helper classes and integration with the Zend_Controller, it’s really powerful and easy to use. I also integrated Zend_Auth, which required developing an LDAP adapter. Setting everything up took a few minutes.

Enough for today.