Archive for the ‘ramblings’ Category
There’s no business like live business
Today, two months, after joining the 2dehands.be team, we released code on which I contributed a significant amount of code for the first time. Considered I’ve been learning Perl along the way, and my last experience with a reasonable high- traffic site was at fabchannel.com, it was thrilling to see a big change being pushed to the live servers, watching the logs as they scrolled by and monitoring the new change. It did feel like somewhat of a swan-song to me.
The change we just pushed has been a big change, as it directly touches the users who interact with our site. For years, 2dehands has been running after a “firewall” of captcha’s and smart anti-spam measurements without actually asking any sort of confirmation from our users, contrary to most sites, where user-interaction starts with password-confirmation.
Our intial barrier for using the website may have been raised by demanding e-mail confirmation, but I am convinced it’ll offer a better overall user-experience in the long run. Having confirmed users means we can slacken some of our anti-spam measurements, improve the quality of content and reach our users when we need to.
However, the most exiting part of this change was monitoring the live data, as it reflected the change: seeing registrations being confirmed as users clicked the links in their e-mail just seconds after the change went live.
Dada code…
Code style among programmers touches a sensitive subject. It may be hard to understand for an outsider, but code style can make the difference between grasping the function of a piece of code within seconds, or having to plough trough each line individually, correcting or changing markup as you go. Even while typing, a certain way of “doing” things may influence the logic you’re writing down.
RYO – I’m an apprentice
(RYO – roll your own)
Suddenly, on some rainy sunday afternoon I decided to start buildingmy own “Web Application Framework”
It did not start out as a framework immediately, more like gradually formalizing code I’ve written before into a library, removing overlapsand stubs and cleaning up naming, as a part of a small, quick codeproject I need to finish. With building “my own application framework” I mean that I set out tocreate code for other people to read and use, with a public coderepository and real documentation.The first question, of course, is WHY.