Toluu

What I accidently learnt about programming

Expanding The Blogosphere

10 Reasons Why Fable 2 SucksOctober 29

This weekend a product got me back in to blogging, but for all the wrong reasons. I had been looking forward to playing Fable 2 and really getting back to my RPG routes, I had this amazing vision of the next generation of Oblivion. In fact for all the sales hype from Peter Molyneux you would have believed we were witnessing the dawn of a new age in gaming, but as has been the case in recent years his claims have again proved to be completely unfounded.

So after putting a lot of my time into playing this game, (and I only continued as all the reviews said it got better as you went along). I felt I needed to put down in writing what I think really sucks.

1. Disjointed World

The world in general feels very disjointed - maybe because there are load screens (how 80’s is that?) but the world does not feel well put together and at no point during playing it did I feel well orientated, e.g. if I go north I find this, or go east a bit and I will find a castle. Again this may be because in Fable you always follow a path and cannot go cross country.

2. Repetition Makes Good Gameplay?

Am I really expected to sit in front of a swinging meter that I have to press a single button to stop to simulate me fashioning a sword? So I get to be a level 3 blacksmith (after a good 30 minutes of MINDLESS boredom) - and I have made a decent amount of cash (totally unbalanced amount in comparison to what you get from quests at the stage I was in the game.) -

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

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

Launched fav.or.itFebruary 27

It has been an epic struggle but finally we have launched fav.or.it, still in closed beta but it is live and people are using it as I type this post. We are probably two months later than originally planned but we have managed to squeeze in every feature we could think of and then some! Even with the small team that we have I think we have worked miracles, PHP and the Zend Framework have both made this possible and in using them I have every confidence that we will be able to scale this up to millions (hopefully) of users.

Now it is launched I may be able to return to normal blogging behaviour rather than working 14 hour days coding all the time. I have certainly learnt a lot in building this and I am sure I have still lots more to learn but I hope I can pass on some of the things we have done right and lots that we have done wrong and you maybe will be able to learn from those lessons.

If you have not come across fav.or.it before go check it out and read the blog that has lots of details on what it is.

My thanks to my wife Helen for being so amazingly supportive especially as we have a 1 month old baby girl who is taking up so much of her time and she still finds time to keep me going as well! And also to Amelia (our daughter) who’s funny faces now keep me amused every day. And lastly to all of my wonderful readers who have kept reading even when I have rambled on, written bad posts