Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

PHP is meant to die

PHP is meant to die

This one is not your average PHP bashing.  It only covers one, but rather generic, problem with PHP – dying, no matter what.  Personally, I am familiar with the problem and I had to work around it as well (that’s how Locker came to be), but I’ve never had a project with high enough load to trigger a major issue.

There’s more to this. If you’ve used PHP an awful lot , you may have experienced this very weird issue:

Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

What does that mean? I honestly have no idea. I can’t find the line #0 into an unknown PHP file.

Happy birthday, GitHub!

GitHub is five years old.  I find it really difficult to believe that the service I rely on so heavily, both at work and at home, haven’t even been around so recently.  I use GitHub both at work, and at home.   In fact, every single piece of development I do, even if that’s just for a one time bash oneliner, I start it with a new git repository.  And more often than not, that repository ends up being pushed to GitHub.

octocat

 

 

 

Happy birthday, guys!  Please keep doing what you are doing.  It obviously works for millions of people.

You can certainly build open source software in .N…

You can certainly build open source software in .NET. And many do. But it never feels natural. It never feels right. Nobody accepts your patch to a core .NET class library no matter how hard you try. It always feels like you’re swimming upstream, in a world of small and large businesses using .NET that really aren’t interested in sharing their code with the world – probably because they know it would suck if they did, anyway. It is just not a native part of the Microsoft .NET culture to make things open source, especially not the things that suck. If you are afraid the things you share will suck, that fear will render you incapable of truly and deeply giving back. The most, uh, delightful… bit of open source communities is how they aren’t afraid to let it “all hang out”, so to speak.

So as a result, for any given task in .NET you might have – if you’re lucky – a choice of maybe two decent-ish libraries. Whereas in any popular open source language, you’ll easily have a dozen choices for the same task. Yeah, maybe six of them will be broken, obsolete, useless, or downright crazy. But hey, even factoring in some natural open source spoilage, you’re still ahead by a factor of three! A winner is you!

Jeff Atwood