Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
A quick question. Do you need to know what Web Server I am running? Your answer is yes? I know, your answer is "I don't really care." Yes, I know you don't care, but I am sending you this information anyway with each web request.
Web development differs from environment to environment. If you are a .Net developer, you may have a different mindset than a person who works with PHP or ruby. In .Net, when you compile and deploy your code, an application is started and waits for web requests. It is up and spinning in a loop until a request comes. Not so in PHP. Before you make the request, there is nothing.
I'm in the category of people who are in a permanent leave of absence when it comes to college, or the more technical term a school dropout. This could be the start of a great narrative, or the source of many rejections.
Every time I look at code that obviously looks copied-and-pasted from the web, I cringe. They didn't even bother to update the variables to make sense in their own code. Why are people still using deprecated functions, SQL injection vulnerable code, or freely opening up their computer to the whole world?
After a few years I have forgotten something as fundamental as bread and butter.
Have you ever thought about getting into this programming thing? Heard a few things about code camp and now want to join the wagon? Obviously if you want to work with code, you need to have a computer. Not just any computer of course, but the best money can buy. Note that every programmer use their own suitable tools, so all I can help you with is share my own arsenal.
One of the recurring tasks as a software developer is to fix bugs on tools that have been designed for an earlier time. You may get a project that was written in PHP 4, or a JavaScript tool that still tries to sniff for Netscape. It is easy to see how outdated the tools are and try to upgrade them. Most often than not, the task turns into a complete redesign rather than a bug fix and it ends up costing much more time than originally planned.
If you struggled for a while trying to figure out why apache or nginx crops the content of your CSS files or it adds a bunch of gibberish at the end of the files, fear no more. The problem can be solved by simply turning off sendfile?
In software development, there is no such thing as an application that doesn't fail. Do you remember the Blue screen of death? When it happened, there was nothing you could do but restart your machine and hope it doesn't happen again. But how about the latest Windows OS? How come you don't see those errors as often as before? The answer is, Microsoft spent more time on error handling.
Imagine a world where things just work the way they are supposed to. The application never crashes, the deployment is always successful, every team member follow the rules, and the FedEx guy is always on time. This is what we expect from our day to day work and fortunately it never happens. What we call ordinary is out of the ordinary.
