I am going to keep this short and sweet and wax poetic about a certain programming idiom that irks me to no end, and provide my preferred alternative.
Now, most Perl programmers know that it’s very useful to pass in a hash (or hashref!) of parameters for functions that are very very long. It’s useful and keeps things tidy.
I’m a little bit behind the times. I was supposed to post something up here last week, but was so wrapped up in actually working on what I was going to write about that I completely forgot.
Gramene is going to be rolling out an autocomplete feature to offer suggestions to users sometime in the near future. You can sample the wonderfully suggestive goodness here until we go live.
I love refactoring code.
One of the tenets of Extreme Programming is You ain’t gonna need it. Or, more verbosely stated: Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.
And the rationale for this is that humans, as a species, are notoriously bad at predicting the future. Psychics are wrong more often than not. The end of the world hasn’t come nearly as often as it’s been predicted. I have no clue what I’m going to have for lunch today. So in our software, as in life, we should focus on the present. That’s what we know and what we should make our decisions off of.
Build with a nod towards the future, but that nod should be keeping in mind the fact that software needs to breathe and evolve and change, so we shouldn’t stifle it too much in its development. It’ll need to change in the future. But until then, build for right now.
After lunch (we went to Quizno’s, which was sold to me as being much closer to campus than was actually the case), we dove back into things. It’s simply incredible how much information leaves along with your staff if they switch jobs. And I’m not even talking about simple knowledge of your systems or processes. The history of your workplace gets lost as well, as people who know the origin of things leave and new folks don’t have opportunity to learn how something came to be. Fortunately, I like telling stories and regaled them with many before we had to head back for the afternoon sessions.
YAPC (the Yet Another Perl Conference – http://www.yapc.org) was back in Chicago this year so I got to go head down there for a day. Unfortunately, I was sick on Monday and our babysitter canceled for Wednesday so I was only able to attend one day of the event. But what a day it was.
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