Not ever line of code can be reused. A lot of web development is about crafting a very specific solution. Localization, error handling, and coding conventions introduce challenges.

This is part of a post from one of the Mozilla blogs that I’m following, namely the blog of Austin King.

Now, this is as straight forward and clear as it is correct, not ever line of code can be reused. Putting it out of its initial context (web development that is) and bringing it into to context of enterprise applications it becomes pure evil, used as an excuse to re-invent a perfectly good wheel.

Photo by tcp909

Some advice:

• Reuse as much as you can, extracting recurring pieces of code as methods
• If common code spawns between projects, always extract it in a common library
• Run a copy-paste detector such as CPD. Extract the code to methods.
• Try to keep your methods under a fixed number of lines, let’s say 20. Doing this will force you to extract consistent pieces of code in separate methods, making them more re-usable
• Try to maintain low cyclomatic complexity. Use a metrics package such as PMD or Panopticode. Refactor complex methods to smaller, less complex chunks of reusable code.
• If you have the feeling that it’s the second time you’ve written a piece of code, search for the first one, because it’s usually true.

Now go and read a good book about this kind of stuff. I recommend The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. It’s an excellent book for beginners but don’t fear - it’s superb even if you’re an experienced developer, I caught some nice Groovy tips that made the reading worth while, maybe you’ll find something interesting too.

Photo by Louis Abate

What I have noticed though is that Twitter is pretty addictive once you really understand what it is, and what it’s not. Once you understand that it’s not just a website where you tell the world that you are just about to take a shower or eat a peach and you really start to use Twitter you’ll notice this too.

Ever had the feeling that you really want to see what the people you follow have to say right now?

Ever pressed refresh on you browser or clicked “Update tweets now” in you Twitter client twice in a couple of minutes?

That’s called “a distraction”.

It’s what makes you less productive by getting you out of your “flow”.

Humans are not multi-tasking. We just like to think that we are!
Once you are distracted and you loose your focus on the task at hand it may take a couple of minutes or even an hour for you to get back you rhythm.

So here are my four tips on how to avoid a productivity loss:

1. Don’t check Twitter updates very often
Checking what’s up on Twitter every second destroys your concentration. It isn’t really helpful either.
When you feel the urge to press refresh or to click that “Update now” button - just stop.

If you have a Twitter client go to the settings window and set the auto-update frequency to a large value, like 2 or three hours. This way you won’t see the pop-up that often and you won’t feel the need to see what everybody is saying.

In time you will get accustomed to the reality that tweets are not critical.

2. Only follow people that deserve it
If you will follow the first tip, this second one is a must!
By checking Twitter only once or twice every day you will accumulate a lot of tweets, tweets that you will have to either read or ignore.

Making sure that you only receive high quality tweets from high quality tweeters will make your time using Twitter more pleasant.

You can do this the simple way - just unfollow anybody that annoys you or that tweets things that you have no interest in (like getting rich instantly by clicking on a link)

3. Use a client that has good filtering
If you follow the first tip and check Twitter messages rarely you’ll soon have a lot of them to read. Even if you follow the second tip you’ll still have a lot of them so a good client that has good filtering will help you read what you are interested in.

Just filter by what you are interested in or by author and get the most out of the Twitter experience.

4. Only tweet if you have something valuable to share
One would say that if so many people are tweeting a lot of interesting content is generated. Wrong!
Most of the Twitter content is noise. People announcing their third pizza for the day, people charming you into “winning a million dollars” or even automated bots auto-messaging and auto-following everybody.

You can help stop some of the noise and make yourself more useful (by not spending you whole time tweeting useless stuff) by just tweeting interesting content that adds value to your followers.

That’s it for my 4 tips on how to avoid a Twitter-induced productivity loss. Please leave your thoughts and experiences using the comment box.

Preemptive strike: If your job is monitoring Twitter for product-related complaints, if you are a marketer or publicist using Twitter as a business model or if you are a Twitter spammer you can just ignore everything that I just said.

Frankly, this is not really a secret and it’s not just great for your users - having software that can be quickly adapted to any language or culture is a big plus for you and your company.

Writing software that speaks their language is not hard these days, as most frameworks have this support built in, and if your framework or technology doesn’t, it’s time to look for something new.

The infrastructure work of building an internationalizable and localizable product is usually already in place, but using this support is up to you. Most developers tend to treat this subject lightly, but I have found that the investment is well worth it.

Some tips for building applications that can be easily internationalized and localized:

• Make sure the technology that you want to use has support for easy internationalization and localization. If it doesn’t, and you still want to use it, think about the costs of developing localization support for that technology or framework. If the costs are higher than switching to another technology…switch
• Localization doesn’t just mean translation. Consider the cultural aspects
• Always consider bi-directional text, even if exporting to Arab or Asian countries is out of the question now, in the future…who knows. The Internet has made the world a small place
• Never hard-code date or currency formats, it’s just plain wrong
• Remember that different locales have different decimal and thousands separators, don’t hard-code these either
• Keep your strings in an easy-to-translate format. Usually, you’re not the one translating your application strings, which means that your strings must be sent to a translator. If you keep your strings in a complicated format (or hard-coded in your product), you’ll always loose time converting your format to a translator readable (normal human readable) format. Either keep your strings in a simple format, such as a flat text file (think about the.properties file format used in Java applications) or use a special translated text management tool
• If possible, don’t embed your translation file in the binary of your application so that new translations can be easily added without re-compiling and updating. Doing translation update releases just annoys your user base
• Have a native of the language and culture you are targeting use your application. This way, you can be sure that no critical translation or cultural errors have slipped into your product. Try not to use the same person that translated your text, for easily understandable reasons.

The process of localization may also include presenting your application in a different way or highlighting different features so your marketing approach could change(and it should change) also.

In the process of analyzing requirements and development, I usually try to learn the language and cultural habits myself (and I like to have my team do the same). You don’t have to learn the whole language, you just have to learn the terms used in the specific domain you’re targeting, as this can have an important impact on requirements gathering and even on product development, but more on this aspect in another post.

• start early
• always disable ARCHIVELOG….always
• set UNDO retention to a small value, let’s say 5 seconds
• get coffee…
• wait
• remember to enable ARCHIVELOG… when in production

Somebody stopped me on the street this morning. I was just walking, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, my backpack on, headphones and a gray woolly hat… a coffee in one hand, a smoke in the other…
I guess I was also kind off dancing, you know when you walk shaking your head because you’re listening to something nice…

This guy just stopped me and he said “Hey, what are you listening too?“, I tell him. He says “Are you going to work?“… I’m already thinking “maybe I know him”.

He says “Dude, you must really have a nice job, and you must really like it. You look so relaxed, it’s 10 AM, you’re not in a hurry and you look happy… Anyway, have a beautiful day“. Then he just left.

He is absolutely right, although lately it’s been really crappy(cotton picking, sugar-cane cutting crappy), I still really like my job…

One of the updates was IE8, and this is the update story(unfinished):
• Windows Update downloads the “IE8 Update”
• The “IE8 Update” starts up, decompresses something in c:\<random string> and says “I have to restart your computer. It will update some stuff and then restart again. During this time you won’t be able to use screen readers, because the update will run before any user services start up”. I say “Ok, do it”
• The computer restarts, Windows boots up
• IE8 Update appears, decompressing some other stuff in c:\<random string> and then it displays a nice window saying “Dude, I will start downloading updates”
• The following window appears:

Some aspects of this window:
- it has nice colors in a modern gradient like mix-up
- it has no buttons whatsoever
- it says Downloading
- YOU CANT BLOODY CLOSE IT WITHOUT KILLING THE DAMN PROCESS, WHICH I DON’T WANT TO DO

30 minutes have passed since it begun downloading and I think it’s downloading the bloody Internet. 30 minutes is forever when you are keeping a user staring at a window that never does anything.

I’ll update this post once it finishes (or not).

UPDATE: Only took 40 minutes, restarted again and now it works

Rev 10-12 years ago, I used to play this nice Nintendo game called E.V.O.. I absolutely loved this game.

I would start with you (the player) as a small fish trying to eat your way through evolution. You would later get to be a dinosaur….. and so on.That was very nice. I played this game almost half of my life, just like StarCraft…

Fast forward 2008, enter Spore…. oh my god. Actually, what I am talking about… you can be your own god.

And how did I find this game? Browsing SpaceCollective and finding a TED video of Will Wright (part of my pantheon of e-gods) present the game. Just fell into my lap, literally.

If you like Sci-Fi, science, computers and games, you really must see this video of Will Wright describing Spore.

If this is old news for you… you could have told me earlier.

Oh yeah, “Happy new year!”

And a good day it was. A nice, short day with a lot of accomplishments.

I got my new ID card (I came out good in the photo, which is a plus), I saw my kitchen almost done (the nice colors we picked, excellent work by extraordinary workers), work was good (as opposed to the usual nasty nature of my work this year).

My wife bought me a classical guitar, which I already love, just like I love my wife (WAF +1, if you know what I’m talking about).
I’m going to learn to play by reserving 15 minutes every morning.

I hope that your day was as good as mine.

I’m back!

I’ve missed work - just a little - but don’t let anybody know. The second day after my leave I had something really interesting to do, which kept me at work until midnight. Finishing successfully gave me the self esteem boost that I call “I love my job”. It’s one of those rare (rare now, once often) moments that remind me why I became a developer. Enough of that, back to business.

I’m married now, to a beautiful and fun woman that understands what makes me tick, and that’s wonderful. We are fixing our future house, which I hope we are going to finish by December which will include my hopefully spacious office (I say hopefully because we are going to share it, as she want gym stuff in it too). I’m going to use the new office for my fun work (that means work that I don’t perform at the office, which isn’t as fun anymore).

This fun work includes rewriting GUtil into something much better which will take full advantage of Firefox 3, working on the XUL data collection application that I’m going to hopefully finish this year (and which I’m going to use to catalog my stuff - 100+ SciFI and business books, currency collection, god knows how many DVD’s - so I am actully going to dogfood it) and testing Shredder/TB3.

Speaking about ThunderBird 3, it’s almost in Alpha 3 now, so we need all the help we can get. If you have a few hours, please join the testing effort and help us make the next version of Thunderbird a smash hit! After you read some testing instructions for Alpha 3 you can complete a smoketest in a little over an hour and give something back. It’s that simple.

For the grand finale, I’m leaving you with another great book. Odyssey by Jack McDevitt is a great space adventure, in the spirit of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It’s not very big and it’s easy to digest.

I’m switching to George Martin for this week’s “on my way to work reading”. Cheers!

This old saying is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Sometimes, the most difficult times are the most beautiful and most rewarding. They challenge us, they test us and most often they bring out the best in us.

Well, I’m getting married tomorrow. I’ve had some crazy months, filled with a lot of work, graduating, buying a house, trying to fix it and now getting married. Wonderful, interesting, crazy, exhausting but mostly happy times.

I’ll be away for some time, in the meanwhile, I’m leaving you with an interesting book that I’ve recently read:
It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden is an excellent book with a lot of good advice on how to make it in any business.

Its main focus is advertising although it is useful in any industry; it’s perfect for small flights, as it packs a lot of insight in a nicely fit package.