jamesdeakin.com

I had a strange Sunday, I wrote a script that mashes up text. I fed it some English proverbs and this was the result. Thing is i’m not sure what possessed me to do that.

You can tell by the fact that they had obviously prioritized correctly. They had identified the features that were of high business value and delivered them before the others. That’s why the Emperor was able to gloat about having a fully functional Deathstar. Ok some of the toilets didn’t work but they were first to market with the big planet killing particle beam and that gave the Empire a business advantage.

I wouldn’t recommend Darth’s management style though. The empire suffered from high staff turnover.

Recently I realized what is missing from programming languages. What, why and who. 

All we have is how. When you fire up an IDE or open a file in a text editor all you get lots of how. 

Stuff like. 

If(camera.isavailable == true)
{
    camera.snapShot();
}

You have to figure out the what from the how. You read that and you realize that there is some object called camera and that it has a property that says if it’s currently available and that if it is that it should execute its snapShot(); method. None of that explicitly tells you what the person who wrote the code was trying to do, you have to guess. 

Why does he want to take a snap shot? you would have to read a lot of code to know for sure and in some cases you might not be able to tell even if you read all the code in the whole app.

Why is even worse. There are lots of times that I have been left wondering why a developer tried to do something In a particular way. Often that cost me and the projects I was working on lots of time. 

Who is in most cases non existent. Ok a good IDE usually puts the name of the developer at the top of the file but if you have just been sent a load of code you have no idea who John doe was, where he worked what he was doing on the project.

So all of this is left to documentation and we all know how often that is inaccurate or simply not available.

Isn’t it time we developed a language that had who when how what and why as an integral part of the code? Time for a language that is truly self documenting.

It was great to catch up with the guys at LFPUG last week. It was an impressive turn out  and an even more impressive couple of sessions. Eamonn Faherty put the assembled masses through their paces with a session on design patterns and Richard Lord gave a brilliant round up of the latest and greatest ActionScript frameworks and tool kits.

While he was talking about the various options in-terms of dependancy injection, he really got me thinking about what might be missing from the ActionScript communities bag of tricks. We had a bit of a chat about how we could make aspect oriented programming work in AS3 after the session.

I have to drop in more often, I had almost forgotten how much fun it is. Talking about code and drinking, what could be better?

Generative art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art
http://gskinner.com/playpen/tweetcoding_0/
http://www.openframeworks.cc/
http://www.flight404.com/version8/
http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/index.html
http://jot.eriknatzke.com/?p=315
http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/vertexmap/
http://www.letitbloom.com/#ralph

data visualization
http://blog.blprnt.com/
http://blog.blprnt.com/
http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Audio
http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix
http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html

Other
http://aviary.com/
http://www.youtube.com/twinrawk

I came across some great resources while putting together some documentation on design patterns for our team. I figured I would share.

http://www.antropyconsulting.com/code/adobe_flex/

http://www.as3dp.com/2009/07/15/actionscript-30-design-pattern-catalog-creational-patterns/

After reading an excellent post at http://virtualnomad.net/2007/11/17/aspect-oriented-programming-in-actionscript3/ I got all excited. Perhaps we can make aspect oriented AS3 work.

Good news. I’ve been given the go-ahead to hire some more developers, particularly of the ActionScript variety. Which means, if you play your cards right – and you’re a brilliant ActionScripter – you could come and work with me (woo hoo).

You could get to do some really cutting edge work for some great clients – like Sony, Sony Ericsson, BMW and Vodafone. And there’s loads of variety – everything from Microsites and Air apps to live events. Here’s some of the fun stuff we have done in the past.

http://www.daredigital.com/work/work.html

I know I’m biased, but Dare really is a great place to work. The people are nice. The work is always full of interesting challenges and there’s free beer on Fridays, breakfast in the morning and a bunch of other benefits. If you think you’re up to it, drop me an email with your CV james.deakin@daredigital.com and make sure you copy in Lucy Cadman, Dare’s Recruitment Co-ordinator lucy.cadman@daredigital.com.

http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html

Wow!

I’m really pleased to see that the latest version of Ubuntu has been released. I think its great that the opensource community have managed deliver a user friendly OS with the capabilities this project has. Ubuntu enables people access to great computing power with a very good user experience at zero software cost. I think that the efforts of the Ubuntu team should be applauded.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/904features/