On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Peter Karunyu <pkarunyu@gmail.com> wrote:
2. there-is-not-so-awesome,-go-here-instead1. you-can-get-there-faster-this-way orSo essentially, what I am proposing is having peeps who have been-there-done-that help those who have not:A few weeks ago, I spent an entire day using google-try-error to setup Phing and use it to build some code I have. Now, what if Laban had explained to me in 5mins what things need to be in my PATH for Phing to work ok, that is me acquiring the same knowledge in 5mins as opposed to 8hrs, and I would have spent the next 7hrs learning how to make Phing make me tea.Plus some recruiters have this annoying habit of testing for subtle sys admin skills in job interviews...Exactly! Now we talking!In an ideal world, the sys admin will setup all the stuff needed by the developer. But sometimes, the sys admin does not exist, and the said developer needs to know how to setup his/her tools and environment.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Martin Chiteri <martin.chiteri@gmail.com> wrote:
@Peter,On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Peter Karunyu <pkarunyu@gmail.com> wrote:
@Martin, yes and no.Six years ago, I spent an entire semester break, 4 weeks, cooped up in my dorm room trying to configure php.ini and httpd.conf to talk nicely to each other and to MySQL. Those days, xampp or wamp didnt exist, or at least I didnt know that they did. And when those three did eventually talk to each other, I became a celebrity for a short while in the developer community @ campus.
I would differ slightly with you on this because what you have just described are purely system administrative tasks. In an ideal condition a developer should spend time fidgeting with the configurations of a server. If anything, she / he should just press a single button after completing running test his / her test suit and deploy the appliction. Else, someone else should do this.Now, if only Laban had taken 1 day to show me how and to explain why, I would have spent the rest of that month learning something else, like the benefits of separating PHP code from HTML.What I am suggesting here is getting a newborn programmer, who knows zilch, and in a matter of 2 weeks, have them know enough to make the rest of their programming path grow at an exponential pace.
Anyway, I get your point but what I mean is that coding is much more than just writing the source instructions to a program. You need to research, think, talk to people if need be (forums/BBs), type, debug, test code, fix problems, publish your sources for others in a VCS, read bug reports, respond to e-mails etc. This is much more involving to be done by a single person in just two weeks. If you can do this (as the novice programmer) you are probably a highly gifted autistic savant.Martin.And, a programmer who lectures programming is totally different from a lecturer who teaches programming.I've had the chance of working in a local University and observed firsthand the rather pronounced weaknesses of the latter.
Regards,On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Martin Chiteri <martin.chiteri@gmail.com> wrote:
In addition @Peter, if Laban and the two or three others were to carry out your proposal effectively that might most likely imply they shift their professions to teaching perhaps on a full-time basis.
Something else in relation to design patterns: They were created exactly to tackle the problems you have mentioned. That of noobies not having to start dealing with (apparently solved) problems from scratch by standing on the shoulders of Titans. Even before the gang-of-four and Martin Fowler among others formalized the topic, people were already using the said techniques (patterns) to fix the common problems programmers of the time were experiencing due to mostly design flaws in C / C++ among other compilers / interpreters, generally in O-O programming styles. There are interesting comments on this Slashdot thread [http://developers.slashdot.org/story/02/10/28/2319251/design-patterns]Another thing I tend to see is that the design patterns are used less in most cases than not or at other times coders uses them unknowingly.Martin.On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Peter Karunyu <pkarunyu@gmail.com> wrote:
@Laban, if I could propose to you that we, plus any other interested coder here, come together and offer our combined experience, to noobie programmers in our local colleges and Universities, what would say?Picture this; a second year student knowing EVERYTHING you know about software development, what would they achieve by 4th year?http://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns
In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Erick Njenga <eriknjenga@gmail.com> wrote:
Awesome!
On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Laban Mwangi <lmwangi@gmail.com> wrote:
https://github.com/thomasdavis/best-practices
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