Friday 6 July 2012

Developer stereotypes

Young hacker - quickly and accurately writes huge swathes of code that works but nobody else can understand or fiddle with. Unit tests etc are an annoyance that just slow them down.

Puzzler - sees writing code as a series of puzzles to solve. How you solve them and what happens after that is not important. Once you have finished the "crossword" just move on.

Old hacker - slow and inaccurate but knows a lot of paths to ignore and needs unit tests to support the weight of their own code. Tendency to be grumpy as they have discussed X too many times already.

By the book - if it is not in a book then it is _wrong_! Don't bother trying to debate anything with them as only the book can explain it properly. Have you read the book!?

Tidy - doesn't really care what the code does or how it behaves but has a compulsion to re-write everything in a tidy way. Big danger is that they will happily spend months re-writing something just so it follows how they think it should be done.

Fiddle till it works - has no real clue what is going on but if they mess with something long enough it will eventually do roughly what is needed. Not worth trying to get them to tidy it up. It took them days to get it working and they are not prepared to mess with it again.

Wednesday 29 February 2012

Demo of our SQL Query Builder widget

http://redquerybuilder.appspot.com/

Pure JavaScript and easy to connect to jQuery, GWT etc

Just feed it meta data and off it goes.