Do you think it's fair for a company to mandate work on projects outside of school/work?

pickdp7 · 1 year

Paranoid much?

Coming from someone who has interviewed lots of developers in the past, let me give you another 2p-worth opinion. Another reason interviewers like to see outside projects is that a)generally university projects are a bit out of date and b)coding during education is often different to real world coding. A good example of b is comments - during education the lecturers like you to over comment to ensure you're understanding what you're doing, during work most senior developers prefer to reduce the comments to just explaining the "why" you're doing something a certain way and to prefer to clarify code over adding useless comments.

I'm sure you can get a job without needing to put in 40 hours per week outside of school in coding on projects, but in a competitive market place every little helps - so if you can try to get involved in a project or start one, it may just help you get that better job.

bjartn · 2 years

Then you should have rewritten the methods - you've still got a crappy unmaintainable heap, you just now know (roughly) what it does.

Sticking a comment at the top to explain crap code is like sweeping it under the rug.

fox_mulder · 2 years

According to http://www.csgnetwork.com/csdlspeedcalc.html 100KB should take 24 seconds to download over a 33.6kbps modem. So, it taking 1 minute means either the server was under really heavy load or your broadband was temporarily being crap! On a 512kbps ADSL that should have taken a few seconds max (and 512kbps is't really current these days)

Either way, 100KB in the 21st century is nothing - stop whining about it! I'm not a designer, but if you don't want pages that look like it was someone's first outing in HTML you have to accept that by the time you add a few images, some styling and some client-side behaviour, it adds up.

And don't say it's not required, not everyone is developing a static page of content that will remain up for 8 years.

malcontent · 2 years

I created a generator for 37 Signals inspired admin interfaces.

http://github.com/andyjeffries/andy_admin

I only use it for internal projects or private admin areas, if you're selling a product and giving your customers an interface like that, you may need to check with 37 Signals (then again, I didn't copy any of their code and it is a redesign with theirs in mind rather than pixel for pixel copying... but it's at your risk anyway).

hxcloud99 · 2 years

1) Don't write the same code in lots of places (within an application/site/system and between different applications/sites/systems) - extract in to a library/framework/whatever.

2) When considering the above, learn about what frameworks are out there, they can save you so much work and make your day much more pleasant.

(yes in my younger years I wrote the same DB code over and over again before switching to a code generation system, then later extract it to a class heirachy - and now I don't bother with that thanks to formerly Symfony and now Rails).

andyjeffries · 2 years

reflog is in Tip 21. Previous References You’ve Viewed

andyjeffries · 2 years

LOL!!! I wasn't saying I was an Apple fanboi, just that it's great I can use DTrace without any messing about :-)

Never mind, obviously some people were expecting more or something other than I provided but aren't telling me what. Expect more of the same down-voters ;-)

andyjeffries · 2 years

Just out of interest, if you are down-voting this article, can you please post a comment so I know why. That way I can improve next time ;-)

nomorewar · 2 years

This is likely to be a Java/JavaFX applet they are using to handle the uploads. They tend to give warnings exactly like that.

To the other posters, don't be so harsh - you can imagine how a warning like that sounds to a user. Also, there's a big difference between storing cookies and allowing "unrestricted access". For a start security concerns about accessing other users' accounts (as unrestricted would suggest).

I'm a Web Developer before people start going off on the basics, but think about this from a user's point of view. That's a terrible error message (and even worse if JavaFX actually needs unrestricted access).

krizo · 2 years

I use Changes.app for the Mac - it's awesome! http://connectedflow.com/changes/

White_Sox · 2 years

I think it depends on the end of the pay scale you're at. As a junior you don't ("I'm not being paid enough for that"). In the middle you have to. As a senior (with the increased age that goes with it) you tend not to.

I'm a fairly highly paid contractor and am 99% of the time out of the door at 5pm. I do great work 8-5, but after 5pm is my time and if you want me to give up my time I need to be rewarded for it.

amillionnames · 2 years

I honestly can't believe someone wrote a blog post in 2009 using tables for layout...

I understand the guy's a Rails developer not a frontend developer (I am too) but seriously, if you're going to post an article about adding a better design to your site you need to move out of the 90s!

andyjeffries · 3 years

The fact of the matter is that Open Source software is generally more open about their security problems and because of the nature of Open Source they distribute patches to close the hole as easily readable source. This makes developing exploits a much lower entry proposition.

In this manner, if a bug is found in fooForums 1.2.3 then a Google search for "fooForums 1.2.3 (C) Foo Company, GPL" to find the footer text makes finding exploitable sites much easier.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think closed source software is better at security, but not keeping up to date with open source software is a much easier recipe for getting hacked.

As for history proving it wrong every now and then - have you seen the amount of hacked free/open source forums/nuke/etc sites on the net?

andyjeffries

TROPHY CASE

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login