Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard?

swizec · 18 days

It's not that hard. And nobody builts anything "by hand". The rule is if you're doing the same things over and over again you have to automate it so you can concentrate on the new and interesting stuff. Also there are hundreds of thousands of frameworks out there that help you to prevent from doing the same things over and over again.

The goal of every developer should be to learn and solve the "same" problem in a better every time, most of the time the problems are just similar not the same!

domnikl · 26 days

Thanks for this, looks like I can learn much of this implementation :)

notadutchboy · 1 month

I recently did some learning on Erlang, but shortly gave it up because of it's weird syntax and I had no idea what to work on. But I love such use cases and there's so few about Erlang out there, so thanks for this great article! Would love to dig deeper into this language soon!

domnikl · 1 month

Thanks for your feedback and your helpful suggestions! I refactored the class and now there's a Connection class (in a new \Domnikl\Statsd namespace) and I wrote unit tests for both classes. :)

ionphoto · 2 months

You can't expect SQLite and MySQL to behave the same, they just share a basic part of SQL anyway. In fact it's impossible to switch the underlying database system without adding an extra layer, may that be PDO or any other library ...

ionphoto · 2 months

Please stop using and teaching about the mysql extension! Better use (and teach) PDO with the MySQL adapter. It has a OO interface and helps you write more secure queries by automatically escaping query params and has a generic interface for all types of (relational) databases!

aregularcontributor · 2 months

I also made the exakt same experience (but with another project of course) about half a year ago and now I am working here and there on projects mostly on github, started two small Ruby projects and I got some nice feedback about it and already a few pull requests that I merged in. To find something I needed and I wanted to work on was also a long step for me. Nice post!

domnikl · 2 months

Just think of using pub-sub with rabbitmq, the subscriber could be a daemon. And yes, Java, Scala, Node, Ruby whatever may be better, but in the end not everyone can write code in these languages and most of the time you have to choose what all the members of the team are able to read and write.

domnikl · 2 months

I knew that these kinds of comments would appear here. And I know that PHP wasn't designed to run daemons as well, but why should it be a bad idea to use daemons written in PHP for small tasks? I didn't write "go ahead and implement a preforking web server that replaces Apache or nginx or whatever". It's meant to be a teaching example! That's the part of the PHP community (or just the haters?) that I don't like, you just say don't do it, but how should this language ever move forward if everyone just says "yeah it's there but don't even consider to use it"??

rogue_coder · 2 months

You should write about the things that you're interested in, if you don't know what that is, start playing around with new tech stuff, i.e. PHP 5.4 features, Symfony2, ZF2, CouchDB or MongoDB, dependency injection, features from the SPL, Redis, Memcache, maybe you're interested in Algorithms? There's so much fun stuff out there, just try some of it and you'll find something that interests you and you want to write about in your blog :)

_lancelot · 3 months

There definitely is a Ruby way! Have a look at the Ruby Best Practices Book http://majesticseacreature.com/rbp-book/pdfs/rbp_1-0.pdf, it has tons of examples that will lead you to the "Ruby way". I think the owner has dropped all his rights on it, so it's available for free.

domnikl · 3 months

Thanks for this! I added a link to my article and already switched it on my machine.

domnikl · 3 months

Of course you can, tmux and screen are independent of the shell you want to use.

symkat · 3 months

I'll suggest you use Sinatra for this, it supports Rack and it's lightweight and very easy to get started with. Also many Ruby devs follow the rule that one file contains only one single class. Makes it easier if your project grows and you need more classes. MarkdownHandler::process is a very long method, you should consider breaking it into small methods, that are reusable. If you start unit testing your app, this change would be very useful, then you can test each method independently.

domnikl · 3 months

No, haven't that by now, but as I can see WSOC tests a lot of things that messie doesn't support right now, e.g. Cookie handling, HTTP Basic Auth. Messie leaves a lot to the user. For instance, it only gets you one page and then you can get a list of links on that page and decide if you want to crawl that too or not. Spidr does such things automatically (depending on configuration).

domnikl · 3 months

Messie is a very young project, Mechanize has been around for a while, so it definitely is a lot more mature. But I don't intend to copy Mechanize, it can do a lot of things that I don't want to support with messie, e.g. handling of cookies and submitting forms. Messie is just intended to download pages, not to completely automate things.

domnikl

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