Transcending Frontiers

Programming isn’t a science, it’s more of a craft to me. A craft implies a combination of some creativity and some practicality. You can make a wardrobe that does the job, or you can get a craftsman to do the job and you’ll end up with something that is not only functional, but great to look at. Craftsmen build the furniture you buy from antique stores.

Software can certainly be the same. Software can work, or it can work well. It can be inspiring and fun to work on, or it can be terrible and boring. It generally comes down to the skill and work ethic of the person that is writing it in the first place. I want to build an antique, not an $11 chair from Ikea.

Corey Haines has been doing a series of videos about all matters software related, but he seems to be mainly passionate about Pair Programming. I like how he sometimes delves into the psychology of people in an industry that is populated by so many with unusual profiles.

He operates a blog called On Being a Journeyman Software Craftsman and it contains a bunch of videos and short blurbs about things he’s learned while on his trip. I’d check it out and you might learn a bit about some of the cooler ideas out there in the software world.

Just moments ago, we sent out a newsletter (view here) to all our customers introducing them to our February web site give-away. If you or someone you know is thinking about building a web site, this may come in handy. The condition? If 5 or more web sites are commissioned this month, we will draw one lucky winner out of the coveted TFG stubby holder to have their site paid for by us.  

You can get in contact with our team here to get your site underway. At the end of the month if you’re the lucky customer, any monies paid to that date will be refunded.

The winner of this give-away will receive a standard business web site (valued at $4,500) free. We’ll also couple this with a 12 month subscription to our flagship product AuroraCMS. AuroraCMS will enable you to maintain and update your site for the next 12 months with no more to pay. 

Also this month we’ll be donating $250 from every web site commissioned to the NAB Victoria Bushfire Relief Fund to help those in need.

If you’re interested in signing up to our regular newsletter, please do so at our web site. You can also follow us on Twitter or on our Facebook page for more updates.

I got sucked into the Ruby Manor site (in a good way) because of a presentation about the Rack spec and how it works. The Rack talk was quite short and to the point, but had some great examples of how to use Rack for micro-applications.

It’s a bit of a pain that the speaker didn’t repeat the questions in the Q&A section for the internet audience because for the latter third of the talk I had no idea what was being talked about. However the talk piqued my interest in learning a bit more about Rack and how it can be utilised when writing Ruby applications. I thought it might pique other peoples’ interest too!

I don’t know how to describe this plugin any better than in the title. It’s sexy, it makes the page curl, and it’s a jQuery plugin. I see potential uses in a lot of places, but as the author says he doesn’t want it to be that “…next annoying Javascript thing…”. I agree. jQuery Sexy Curls has the potential to make particular pages and parts of applications jump, but other than that I don’t see it taking over the world or anything.

Essentially it gives you a curl in the corner of your page that can be dragged back to reveal another ‘page’ underneath. In the author’s example the under-page is the HTML code for the example.

Debugging most things that include a jQuery chain can be annoying at best and virtually impossible at worst. Now there is a jQuery Firebug Plugin that helps when debugging Javascript that uses jQuery and it seems to do it very well! The plugin allows you to call debug(), assert(), log() or any other Firebug 1.2 call at any point in your chain. Fantastic!.

There are examples in the article of how to use jQuery.Firebug() so I suggest taking a peak.