Shaun Smith » Inspiration

Why X Is Better Than Robotlegs

shaun — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:31:14 +0000

While the core Robotlegs developers do some preparatory undercover work on Robotlegs 2, some adventurous Robotlegs users have decided to take things into their own hands and start building their own ideal frameworks. I think this is great. The best ideas will almost certainly make their way back into RL2 in some shape or form.

Some things that these framework experiments will probably have in common:

Support for the Mediator pattern
Support for the Command pattern
Display-list processing (auto-wire)
Dependency Injection through Swiftsuspenders

The first of these is Boiler by Rasheed Abdul-Aziz (@squeedee): http://devblog.vworkapp.com/post/8538689880/r

Please have a look and give Squeedee some feedback. Some things that I like: convention over configuration, avoiding inheritance, the name!

Clean Code

shaun — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:06:42 +0000

I recently purchased @unclebobmartin‘s awesome book: Clean Code. What a book! I’m going to echo a sentiment that often ripples through the Twittersphere: If you are a programmer and you haven’t read Clean Code you are doing your fellow programmers (and yourself) a great disservice. Seriously.

For fun I decided to dig up the worst code I have ever written – quite a challenge considering how much terrible code I have produced in my life! Have a look at this beauty:

Stupid names, useless comments, multiple levels of abstraction, poor error handling, super deep nesting, etc etc etc. It pretty much breaks every rule in the book. But the best bit has to be this:

$rows_to_populate[$foreign_table][$foreign_id][$module_name][$db_row->id][] = $field_name;

Yes, that’s right, a five dimensional array!

Cognitive Surplus

shaun — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:40:12 +0000

Came across a post on Kieth Peters’ blog called “Where do we find the time?” that linked to this clip. Well worth watching: