Usually a last resort. Often the best thing to do.

Switching jobs and making a career change is a big challenge. New problem domains to learn, new working relationships to build, new brand of instant coffee to get used to. For a programmer one of the more interesting changes can be moving from working on web applications to desktop applications. Here are a few points that i've picked up having made the plunge a few months ago.

• Control of environment. As a web programmer you have a lot of control of the environment your application runs in. Browser issues aside, once a HTTP request hits your servers you have complete control over what happens next. A desktop application has little control over where it is being run, what software is installed with it etc.
• Managing performance. A desktop application performing poorly can be a nightmare to diagnose. The characteristics of the users machine and currently running processes are completly foreign. If your web app is running slowly you not only have the program available but intimate knowledge of the hardware and architecture it is running on. You can make tradeoffs on the servers that your users may not be willing to do for your desktop application.
• 24/7 operations. Most web developers will not only have to create the application, but support it as well. These problems that occur on live systems are usually given high priority pushing more long term work to the back.

I had no idea how narrow my knowledge was. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Have you made the switch from web to desktop, or in the other direction?

One of the patterns I (over)use in php is having a class with only static variables and static functions. To do this in ruby isn't as straight forward as it could be, so here is how to do it.

class StaticKlass

    # ruby class variables are prefixed with "@@" .
    @@variable = nil

    # If you want to provide getters and setters you cant use the attr_accessor
    # keyword, you have to create them manually. By adding the class name to
    # the method definition, we are indicating that this is a method on the
    # class, not in instances of this class
    def StaticKlass.variable= (x)
        @@variable = x
    end

    # the getter is defined to return the class variable when called
    def StaticKlass.variable
        return @@variable
    end

end

Working on scheduled reporting systems, you expect to see the same concepts. What format wiil we send the report in? How will it be delivered? I opened the “scheduled report” table to see how this particular system had been implemented. I couldn’t immediately find which column i was looking for. In fact the only one that looked like it might be useful was something called deliv_method.

deliv_method
206
774
206
206

Ok, so we’ve got a numeric list of delivery methods. Nothing too unusual about that. I just need to find the list either in the database or codebase. But where do we store the format of the report? I worked my way through the report scheduler code until i found this.

$delivMeth = ($row[‘DELIV_METHOD’] >> 8);
$myFormat = ($row[‘DELIV_METHOD’] & 0xFF);

Are those bitwise operators? And even a literal hexadecimal number? The only place i’ve ever seen a bitwise operator is when setting the error reporting level. I’ve looked at this a few times and am still not sure i correctly understand it.

The answer eventually revealed itself.

$a = array(
0×0104 => "Email HTML",
0×0204 => "Email HTML Attachment",
0×0284 => "Email HTML Zipped attach",
0×0201 => "Email PDF",
0×0203 => "Email TSV delim",
0×0283 => "Email TSV delim zipped",
0×0203 => "Email CSV delim",
0×0283 => "Email CSV delim zipped",
0×0304 => "FTP HTML",
0×0301 => "FTP PDF",
0×0303 => "FTP TSV delim",
0×0303 => "FTP CSV delim",
);

Pretty clever you have to admit! Unfortunately it can lead to same rather ugly code.

if ((($('#INPUT\\[DELIVERY_METHOD\\]').val() & 0xFF00) >> 8) != 0×03){

The Bad Code Offsets project is an attempt to get programmers to put money into open source software. We may not be able to change the bad code we have written. Instead we can buy an offset that goes towards creating more good code.

Bad code lives on well past the time we inflicted those bad lines into the global code base. Applications continue to live their lives serving businesses, consumers and the global community at large. Bad code weakens the utility delivered by these applications causing business loss, user dissatisfaction, accidents, disasters and, in general, sucks limited resources towards responding to the after effects of bad code rather than toward the common good.

They have just made a $500 grant to the GPSd project, which aims to shield developers from the idiosyncracies of integrating each GPS device available.

How often do you use open source software. How often have you contributed, either by submitting code or donating money? My gut feeling is that at least 95% of developers haven't done either. The 10 USD I donated will be going to the Apache software foundation. The apache webserver has been at the base of nearly every project I've worked on and will be for a long time to come.

grep is an often used tool on linux. It's job is very simple, to find a string (or regular expression) in a group of files.

grepWin is a gui version and is a lifesaver if you have to use windows as part of your development environment. The best bits are

• Integrates with windows explorer. Search any folder by right clicking on it.
• Results behave just like a windows explorer folder. Right click on the files to edit from the results panel.
• Regular expression support. A feature compared to windows built in search.
• Search and replace. The tool goes further than grep and will do a search and replace over many files.

While looking through some old files I found this gem. It's an essay written seven years ago by Robert L. Read called "How To Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary". It covers a what the writer feels are the most important skills to learn across beginner, intermediate and advanced skill levels.

I remember being heavily influenced by this as it appeared a short time after I first had a real job. seven years is a long time in technology and I was wondering if the advice in it held up. Here are a few excerpts.

2.9 How to Deal with Intermittent Bugs
The intermittent bug has to obey the same laws of logic everything else does. What makes it hard is that it occurs only under unknown conditions. Try to record the circumstances under which it does occur, so that you can guess at what the variability really is. … Try, try, try to reproduce it. If you can't reproduce it, set a trap for it by building a logging system, a special one if you have to, that can log what you guess is what you need when it really occurs.

When I first read this many years ago I was relieved. It's not just me that has these problems. I've used this formula too many times to count.

6.7 How to Know When to Apply Fancy Computer Science
There is a body of knowledge about algorithms, data structures, mathematics, and other gee-whiz stuff that most programmers know about but rarely use. In practice, this wonderful stuff is too complicated and generally unnecessary.

It's the biggest contradiction in our industry that a lot of importance is placed on solutions to complicated problems when most of the time simple solutions to simple problems are needed (and more desirable).

4.1 How to Stay Motivated
It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by the desire to create artifacts that are beautiful, useful, or nifty. … There's a lot of money to be made doing ugly, stupid, and boring stuff; but in the end fun will make the most money for the company.

I'm not sure where I stand on this one. As much as I'd like to believe that fun is always the way to go I'm not sure that it will always pay the bills.

Overall it is still a relevant and important essay for any programmer at any level.

Glue is what holds your application together. Code needs to talk to databases, Javascript is calling your PHP functions using Ajax. When two systems, or different parts of the same system need to talk to each other, you end up with glue. It (hopefully) doesn't have any business logic. It's used or copied by at least a few different parts of your system, perhaps even in different projects in the same organisation.

Glue code holds things together. The only problem is that glue is not your application. Unless you're developing a framework, operating system or perhaps something that needs plugins, glue is not your strength. There are always exceptions but if you are writing glue, especially the same glue for the 3rd or 4th time, then you're not directly working on the application you are building.

Having said that, your project won't survive without glue. So how do you keep everything together?

• Recognise glue. The first step is to understand that you are now writing glue code and not working on business requirements. For example, say you are writing a script to process files that are uploaded to your server. Discovering the files is glue, the processing of then is specific to your application.
• Standardise across your organisation. Glue may start out as a one off but as time moves on it will become apparent which pieces are worth time improving and which aren't.
• Make it as simple to use as possible. It will need to be understood by a larger group of developers than your other code. Put that extra time into documentation and code beautification.
• Make it as robust as possible. You don't want this getting in the way of your 'actual' work.
• Use 3rd party glue. Someone has nearly always been before you. Wiring your PHP and JS together with AJAX? It's been done. Creating a DB access class? Been there, done that. If you think you can do better your probably wrong. You may write better code, but you probably won't document or test it as thoroughly as an open source project has already been.

In conclusion, you want to keep glue simple and straight forward. Recognise what is and isn't glue in your application. Share the glue you have with every one in your team, and if your brave, the outside world.

The idea of glue is described in Eric Raymond's excellent book The art of unix programming.