Toluu

What I accidently learnt about programming

Expanding The Blogosphere

10 Reasons Why I hate Recruitment AgentsJuly 1

Given that I have finally recruited my new CTO and he started today I thought I would write up my thoughts on recruitment agencies. The guys in the office know immediately when one rings me up because my normal pleasant demeanor (honest) suddenly disappears and is replaced with that of the attitude of someone who has had a visit from (Jehovah witness, bailiffs, tax collector). So if you are a recruitment agency I’d advise you not read any further.

These are my 10 reasons why I have this rather unhealthy attitude towards them.
 

1. Asking ‘What is your interview process’

This is a classic, every agency wants to give their candidate ‘the edge’ by finding out what our techniques are for recruitment, I deliberately give them random feedback or just ignore this as I don’t want the interview to be prepared! That is the whole point, if they need to prepare for an interview then they ‘ARE THE WRONG PERSON!!’

2. Ring you up to tell you nothing

This really gets me going, so either

1. they send me an email and then ring up immediately afterwards to ask me what they thought of the email, do they think I do not have a reply button?
3. They ring up to have a ‘a chat’ - right yes someone working in public sector may have time to while away but I actually have a job to do

3. Asking to come meet us

Zend Framework powers fav.or.itJune 17

Today we finally launched fav.or.it. For those who have not been following our exploits for long we have been developing using Zend Framework on PHP, in fact we started using it at around version 0.6 and have worked through the problems as it has grown and evolved.

We have had our issues with performance as we got closer to launch but this is always a risk when using a complex framework built by others, you take a lot of granted and enjoy the speed in which you can build things. But there are always downsides but they are ones we we are happy to have taken, as we have built a massive product with a tiny team (3 developers!).

Now we have launched I really hope it will free my time up much more to start blogging properly and also to start documenting a lot of the framework code that we have extended and give it back to the community. We have built a large raft of performance related code for doing a lot of caching within web 2.0 apps. We have also built our own RESTful library which IMHO is much more powerful than the zend one and also much much faster.

Please do go try out fav.or.it and see what we have built!

Future Technical PostMay 26

We have decided to build a nice new blog system over at fav.or.it based upon wordpress (of course) that allows for all our employees to start blogging (some already have personal blogs) - and also to better categorize the content that we are writing. This means that I will start writing my technical content over on the fav.or.it blog. A feed will be available just to pick up any technical stuff (rather than press release / product updates) so once we have it up and running I will stick up the relevant links for those who are interested in keeping track of my technical stuff (and my very talented teams exploits, which covers design as well)

As a starting point I wrote a post about how I think twitter should be scaled.

So what will I be doing here? I will up my general commentary on life + technology in general.

How to be a better programmer - Part 1April 29

I thought I would re-start my blogging (apologies for the major lapse!) endeavors by covering how to become a better programmer. This will be split into a number of parts as there is a lot to cover! The first part is me feelings about ‘How to be open’ - this covers a range of things but is really about a programmers attitude. I would love to hear back if you feel you are a ‘open’ programmer or not.

How to be Open

In my very first programming job at a games company I was most definitely what I would term a ‘complete git’. Totally arrogant about my abilities and not very receptive to others opinions or new ways of doing things.

When I moved into management I found (with much pain) you cannot have that attitude (unless you really want to be hated) and to move a project forward you need a fine balance between listening to the group and also enforcing a single vision upon a project to achieve a final goal.

I have since alternated between fully management roles and combinations of management and programming. And the attitude change I found had dramatic effects on how I programmed as well.

This meant that now I am a much more ready to look beyond my own solutions . This often means trawling for alternatives on the net which in a large percentage of cases ends with finding someone else’s solution which although on the surface looks solid always has some fundamental flaw that means I re-write it. But in doing so I have already (

Yahoo Tackles Semantic WebMarch 13

TechCrunch released information today that Yahoo is about to join in the semantic web goodness game. I thought I would quickly write up something from a developers point of view what would come out the other end for users.

I have not got the full list of micro-formats being supported but lets go with the easy ones anyway.

hCard

This can represent people, companies, organizations and places. So for instance if you are a company with an about page (everyone has them) having an hCard for Yahoo to pickup on means they can clearly return that data in a search result and in fact allow for a vast yellow pages style search that only looks at hCard information.

hReview

Names says it all, the format covers any webpage that is reviewing something. It contains most of the simple information that would be useful to a search spider such as the name of the review (stored in hCard format) the rating (1-5) and the description. Again this can easily be seen as allowing Yahoo to leverage this structured data to produce clearer results. At the moment they rely (like everyone) on either relationships with companies via datafeeds, or unstructured data to return any kind of review data (film, restaurant, book) - with hReview they ca