2008 May | 24 Hours is not enough

There is a programming language that has been available from MIT for quite a while now called scratch that is aimed at children from the ages of 8 and up. Here is the description from the website:

“Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design”

The IDE (if you can call it that) is very easy to get to grips with. Programs are written by dropping little blocks into the main window which can connect together. Each block represents an action or event that can be executed. If you have ever played with LEGO Mindstorms the same principles apply.

I think it’s a brilliant educational toy for children because it represents itself in a way that is fun to play with and yet at the same time they are learning some basic ideas around programming! Even if they choose to not take programming seriously, at least they will get moreexperience in using a computer as well as exposure to concepts like design, algorithms and creating processes, which are skills which could be used in many other fields.

May 14, 2008 | In development | 2 Comments

Articles and links worth checking out – 14 May 2008

Posted by Steve himself - 14/05/08 at 04:05:52 pm

KISS Development

Posted by Steve himself - 11/05/08 at 05:05:08 pm

I’ve been a programmer for about 5 years now and only recently have I discovered what I believe is the most important aspect of software development that every developer should be aware of, and that is to keep-it-simple-stupid!

It is such a simple and widely used statement yet not many people follow it. I’ve been reading this Book called Enterprise Architecture Planning by Steven Spewak and I came across this passage:

“As an organization grows and becomes more complex, management makes greater demands of their information systems function. They require timely access to data whenever and wherever needed, a useful format for data that can be easily interpreted, accurate and consistent data throughout every department, responsiveness to rapidly changing business conditions, and sharing of data across the enterprise.”

Basically what they are getting at is sharing data with those people that need it at any given time. This book was written a long time ago but the same principle can be applied to modern day development. The need to share data between departments in enterprises is still prevalent today, but since this books conception another platform has emerged where sharing of information is important…the internet. Through the internet we are all able to share information with each other anytime and anywhere, so the need to share it in a manner that is readily available and in a useful format is of the utmost importance.

Let’s take a look at a typical example; social networks. Why are they so popular? Why are there are so many of them out there? The reason is that these networks allow people to share information with people from all over the world. It doesn’t matter whether we actually know each other in “real life” or not, we just share. To most people, the technology behind all these networks doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how facebook manages to scale the way it does or which language it is written in, or how twitter manages to allow millions of people to send in updates about what they are doing. All that matters is they are able to connect and share pictures, video, music and blogs with their friends and family. What’s happening under the bonnet doesn’t matter. And that is where our focus should as developers; giving people the information they need.

Now been able to provide ONLY that which is necessary is not very exciting. As programmers we always want to try out the latest and (supposedly) greatest tools out there. It’s always fun to play with the latest development framework or language that has come onto the market, but the fact is, we only need to do what is required. What this also boils down to is writing the simplest code possible. Nothing fancy, just that which is required. There are several benefits to this including:

Code is easier to maintain
Shorter development cycle
Less bugs
Happier users (They can easily do what they need to)
Happy clients (You deliver an application that does what it needs to)
You could even see performance improvements, because there is less overhead to deal with from unnecessary components.

Been able to deliver an application that does what it’s supposed to in the simplest way possible is dependant on many factors including good knowledge of data requirements by the users and clients, understanding how the business works, who needs access to which data, etc but that is out of the scope of this article. If those other factors have been addressed prior to the commencement of actual coding, writing the application should be a lot more pleasant process.

May 11, 2008 | In development | No Comments

Articles and links worth checking out – 08 May 2008

Posted by Steve himself - 08/05/08 at 06:05:12 pm

Here is another set of articles I’ve come accross that I thought were interesting and wanted to share. Some are old, some are new, but they are all worth your time.
Technology

Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details

Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done

What makes programming so difficult – and can we make it easier?

6 Excellent Firefox Extensions Made To Save You Time

Two Weeks Notice (The daily WTF)

Life

10 Articles That Changed My Life

Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past

Business

Solo Entrepreneur: Dave Novak

The Fun Factor

Well that’s all i could read through tonight. Hopefully you will find them useful or entertaining as well.

May 8, 2008 | In Internet, Links | 1 Comment

Articles and links worth checking out – 06 May 2008

Posted by Steve himself - 06/05/08 at 06:05:30 pm

Here are some blogs and links to cool stuff that I thought that I thought were worth sharing. It might not be all techie stuff but hey…sometimes its nice to take a break from that. Enjoy!

Technology
5 Sources for Free Computer Technology Education Online

How to Become a Professional Web Designer and Programmer

Understanding Model-View-Controller and a related post

MVC explained by the creator

General

How Far Are We From Real Mobile Commerce?

Four hurdles to jump after starting a business

How to Set Deadlines (& 7 Common Mistakes to Avoid)

Do You Make These 5 Mistakes When You Try to Take Action?

9 Ways To Start a Fire Without Matches

The 18 Most Valuable Parts to Success

May 6, 2008 | In Internet, Links | No Comments

Snippet Compiler for .net Developers

Posted by Steve himself - 04/05/08 at 04:05:19 pm

Ever wanted to test out an idea or write a quick POC without having to fire up the old Visual studio? Well here is a cool little tool I found, its called snippet compiler. Its a lightweight text editor that allows you to write and compile your code without having to create a new test solution in Visual studio and all that unneccesary overhead while you are just trying to turn ideas into code. It has syntax highlighting, intellisense and it can compile console or windows applications. It doesn’t seem to have debugging though. They’ve also released a version to work with .net Framework 3.5!

Enjoy

May 4, 2008 | In development | No Comments

What is the software development capital of South Africa?

Posted by Steve himself - 02/05/08 at 05:05:03 am

I wanted to find out what is the software development capital of South Africa? To answer that question we would need to ask the following questions:

In which city is there the most work for developers?
In which city does a developer earn the most money?
Which city has the best Universities/Colleges where you can study software development?
Which city has the highest number of software developers? (for now the platform doesn’t matter)

There are a lot more questions which could be asked but I think that will do for now. Post your other questions in the comments if you like.
I think it would be a close race between Johannesburg and Cape Town. If you have an opinion on the subject I would love to hear it.

May 2, 2008 | In development | 2 Comments

Never forget to read an article or blog again

Posted by Steve himself - 01/05/08 at 04:05:56 am

If you use stumbleupon, you will know how brilliant it is. If you’ve never heard of it I’d recommend downloading the toolbar asap. There is so much content that you will find that you will not know what to do with all of it! And that becomes a problem. There is never enough time to go through all of it and if you start bookmarking each and every single page that you are interested in, your bookmarks become one big mess.

This is where instapaper comes in. It’s a simple little web application to store the links to interesting web pages you have come accross. It’s not a new concept but the way it’s delivered makes it an attractive alternative. The interface is simple, functional and clean and unlike most new Web 2.0 sites, your links are not shared with everyone, there is no need to create a huge profile for yourself, you dont even need to give a password when you sign up, which is something I haven’t seen much before but its really well done. It’s plain and simple and I love it.

When you put it together with stumble upon you have an unlimited amount of fresh content at your finger tips!

May 1, 2008 | In Internet, Links | No Comments

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24 Hours is not enough

Articles and links worth checking out – 23 May 2008

Articles and links worth checking out – 19 May 2008

Teach your child to program with scratch