Bhabishya Kumar

I just read his latest rant Code’s Worst Enemy.
These two paragraphs from his latest rant are exactly my thoughts.

…I think that his “something bad” may well have been the act of creating the book Refactoring, which showed Java programmers how to make their closets bigger and more organized, while showing Martin that he really wanted more stuff in a nice, comfortable, closet-sized closet…….

…..Tragically, the only GoF pattern that can help code get smaller (Interpreter) is utterly ignored by programmers who otherwise have the names of Design Patterns tattooed on their various body parts……

I too believe that each and every line of code that we add to our project brings with it some kind of entropy (disorder). It adds to the clutter making it difficult for us to see what exactly is going on. And that’s why I like attr_accessor
in Ruby over “Alt+Insert” shortcut for Java in IntelliJ IDea, even though both will require the same effort.

It gives me an itch looking at the ROI (Return on Investment) in Java Projects. The ratio of the amount of code that we write to the functionality that we get out of it is really embarrassing.

I think the authors of the mentioned books should have put a Statutory Warning on the back of their books.

Using these patterns/refactorings just for the heck of it may be injurious to your project. Use at your own discretion.

I was initially trying to host this blog at Slicehost which offers bare bone Ubuntu VPS with no pre-installed software. Going by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s article, I thought it might be a good time to finally learn Unix. But it was not to be…

The worst qualities of other VPS Hosting Providers mentioned in that article holds true for Slicehost too, i.e. “requires knowledge of Unix sysadmin”. I guess its not much of a problem for someone used to development on UNIX, but for a guy like me who never had to work on UNIX in entire software development experience, it was a nightmare.

Things didn’t go as smoothly as mentioned in their wiki. At every step, something failed and I had to provide some kind of hack to make it pass. Even the windows hack didn’t help.

Without Windows Explorer, Mouse, Ctrl C, Ctrl V., I feel totally handicapped on UNIX and my productivity goes down drastically. The infinite vi, ESC+INSERT, ESC+wq! killed me. Even the basic operations like scrolling up the ssh console to see the top of error stack trace or copying a block of code from a web page to a file were beyond me.

So, I realized that I was not actually learning anything. Even if I had made it work somehow, something would have broken on future deployments. I decided that I should concentrate more on Rails coding rather than deployment.

Then I came across WebFaction Rails Hosting and their Control Panel Demo. I used their Custom Install Script for Mephisto and got this blog up & running in 10 minutes.

So what about UNIX hacking? Maybe in the next life!