Hello Tinkerer, Goodbye WordPress
It was time for a change. I hosted my blog using WordPress for 5 years and I am glad I did. WordPress is still a great open source project and great blog engine. But it was time for a change and I wanted something low-level. Something I can tinker with.
I took the XML dump of my blog and converted the entries to individual pages using a script I wrote. Even though my script took care of most of the concerns, such as generating mappings from the old URLs to the new URLs, I had to go through each post and make sure it look right. I threw away the not-so-popular posts to save time.
Unfortunately I couldnt’t figure out how to convert the comments. I was hoping to retain them as a list under a Comments heading but it looked horrible. If you are a commenter I ask your forgiveness.
In the process my RSS URL is also changed. It is now http://blog.muhuk.com/rss.xml.
Thanks for reading my blog for 5 years. I hope to see you again.
The Pirate Ninja Rockstar Developer
There is no such thing.
Rockstar Developer is a ridiculous term used by clueless suits. It can only mean someone who’s too ignorant to realize he’s overestimating himself. They find each other, one surfaces his unrealistic expectations and the other makes promises he won’t be able to keep. (And of course they’re both male, we’re talking about serious amounts of testosterone here.)
There are three types of programmers; programmers who can’t write code, average programmers and good programmers.
And you thought Ninja Pirates were tough!
There is a common belief that good programmers can do ten times the work compared to average programmers. This is complete and utter bullshit. A good programmer is of course more productive than the average one, but it’s a realistic advantage. Say, 15%, maybe 25%. I don’t know maybe it is 50%. Hard to measure. But it is definitely not 900%. You need a rockstar developer for that.
There is, however, a ten times difference, in effectiveness, between good programmers and the average programmers. Simply put, the former can do things the latter can’t.
Good programmers are able to come up with better designs and abstractions. They are much less likely to come up with a short-sighted design and paint themselves into a corner.
Another advantage good programmers have over the average ones is taste. Good programmers are less likely to put up with half-assed solutions. They strive for elegance. Narrow-minded suits perceive this as a sign of being arrogant or spoiled.
This very insolence determines the long-term success of projects. With the lack of it, the complexity quickly gets out of hand and simple changes become difficult to implement. Soon average programmers become unable to cope with the monster. Time to look for some rockstar developers.
Yes, good programmers are many times more productive than average programmers. It is not because they can type many times faster but because they don’t make the mistakes average programmers make. Sometimes their experience allows them to avoid the mistakes. But more often it is their taste that prevents the mistakes.
The smart try and find developers with this taste and nurtures it, instead of posting jobs with idiotic “Are you a code ninja?” titles.
Carl Meyer’s Testing Talk At PyCon 2012
In this age and time, any decent web developer takes testing seriously. However testing a piece of code correctly1 and efficiently2 is not as simple as it seems to developers with less experience.
Less Is More, Elegantly Explained
I have stumbled upon this slideshow while randomly clicking through SpeakerDeck. It is about software development, agile and overall success.
Installing Subversion 1.7 on Debian Squeeze via Apt
At work, I have to manage multiple patches on top of Subversion. When I used patch command to merge these patches I had to add and remove files to subversion manually. This was annoying.
Then I discovered svn patch command that is added in version 1.7. Since this version is not in Debian repositories yet I had to use this repository.
I you would like to use the latest subversion and insist on using the package manager like me, follow the steps below: