DataWebTect

Hacknot has a thought provoking essay on the stages/ages of a developer. Very interesting and insightful post. As is pointed out the requirements gathering is one of most downplayed processes, yet it is the reason for the existence of the software development. Sometimes, the business/user may not be clear about what they want simply because they may not know what is available. Therefore there is a need of a business/system analyst, who knows the system and if it is a developer it is better, who can understand the user/business requirements and write it in such a way that the programmer can go and code the same. But this specific skill is so lacking and most of the time the requirements are patchy and the programmer ends up coding a crappy application which may not serve the purpose. There are some insightful developer/programmers who get involved in the requirement gathering phase and help design the application but ultimately the systems/business analysts fail in capturing the essence of the discussion. This gives a need for a requirement gathering tool which can solve the problem. Any takers!!!!

I was seriously stuck with couple of problems.

• However, the application is almost ready
• Payment interface and field validation to be completed
• Session information need to be passed on
• Used the standard php format to separate the pages to header,body and footer
• Now I can change the skin as I need to
• The error was “Headers already sent blah blah blah”
• Scratched my head and spent lot of hours debugging and finally it turns out that the parameters were not passed on to the next page as well as some echo’s need to be removed.
• Whenever you use “header” to redirect the page in php make sure you pass all the parameters that are accessed in the next page with GET
• Next thing is to make sure that there is no echo before the header which will give the error.

Think like I am superstitious as I intentionally did not post on Friday the 13th.

• Completed the landing pages for both the groups.
• It is working as I expected.
• My wife volunteered for the QA of the site - saves me $$$
• Finalize the navigation and menu bars
• Integrate the login information to all the pages
• Finally the payment integration and go live.
• Talk of the town - Google buys doubleclick for $1.3 billion 

This weekend was great.

• File upload/download functionality completed
• Login page completed with the captcha test
• One thing to learn is as you move on you find new pages that are absolutely essential.
• CRUD - Create completed
• Basic searches are complete but Read pages to be developed
• Update and Delete functionality to be added
• Need to think about creating any staging area for the storage before the functionality is finalized.

Development restarted and was able to focus.

• Completed one of the search pages.
• No Ajax yet.
• Bare minimum search criteria.
• Dynamic query build based on the input.
• PHP does wonders for a hardcore Java developer.
• Check out the Great article of “Hack Not” - It is friday and it would take an hour for the read, if you do not yawn in between.

Application development is going well. Here is the update.

• The other functional pages are ready
• File upload page completed
• The application caters to a  niche segment
• Need to start the search pages
• Debating on how to leverage ajax in search
• Need links highlighting the use of ajax in search

A very insightful post “Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus” from Hacknot. Very clear distinction has been made about the programmers and developers, a debate that existed since long time. This post tries to clarify some thoughts. From my personal perspective I believe most of the community starts as programmers at some point and they graduate to become developers. But some stay back because of their passion to new languages,technologies etc., So what are you a programmer or a developer?

Check out the “Seven secrets of Sucessful programmers” which I came across via Tom Kyte and his comments on the subject. My favorite is :

5. Name your variables to aid readability

There are a number of strategies to variable naming. The key is to be consistent and to be as informative as possible. If you name a variable nMonth, you give the programmer extra information as to what that variable is expected to contain. I personally prefer the Hungarian notation style - but whichever style you use, consistency is the key.

The variable naming is one of challenging issues when we do the programming. If your enterprise has a standard for naming the variables  then use it,  otherwise as suggested the Hungarian notation is the best. I have seen messy coding with all sorts of variables that do not make sense and when you try to debug you will stare at the screen and curse the programmer for writing such a code. Somebody can write something like c_threshold as a variable, although you can make out that this variable is referring to some sort of threshold but you are not sure as to what data type it represents. If it is named as nThreshold it would indicate that it is numeric representation and makes some sense.