Slow and steady wins the race
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005I’m still chugging away on the site with the galleries. There is so
much to learn about gallery2 and components! You may have noticed that
I linked to the gallery2 site from the main page. This is so Google can
get a head start on crawling it so that it will do a deep crawl in a
couple months hopefully.
Joel on Software
I started reading a book called Joel on Software upon my
coworker, Joseph’s recommendation. Joel and I share a lot of the same
views on programming, even though I’m still classified as an infantile
peon :).
So far, I’ve been intrigued by two concepts in the book that I’d never thought of before:
- Daily builds
- Writing and following functional specifications
Daily builds were a tough sell for me. We do builds about once a
week at work for our development line, and only for bug fixes in our
production line unless we’re porting must-have features that
will help us survive until the development line becomes the production
one. When I first read this chapter, I was reminded of the book, Showstopper, which
I had read back in 2002. Sure enough, Joel mentions that as an example
of doing daily builds. I couldn’t imagine being on a team of developers
where everyone was changing every API that called every other API and
building it all every day. That’s just crazy!
Function specs were an interesting topic, not because of the specs but because of the idea of program managers
that acted as liasons between small groups of developers. Joel talks
about how if you have n developers, the amount of communication is (n-1)2
because every developer talks to every other developer. Having program
managers allows your communication to scale because the managers talk
to each other, and the developers only talk to their managers. I can
speak to this being awesome as it allows the devloper to not get
involved in politics and just write code.