Please... No More Rock Stars!

Let me cut to the chase: I'm so sick and tired of seeing people advertising for software developers and using nouns to describe these future employees as something they are not.

As a possible candidate for this position, here's why I don't match what you're hiring...

I'm not a rock star. I don't have any recording deals, and I don't have groupies. More importantly, I don't turn around and leave you in the lurch at crunch time because I would rather do something shady at the hotel when I'm meant to be wowing the fans.

I'm not a ninja. For one I have very little martial arts training. More importantly, I don't come in in the middle of the night and drastically upset things so that when you come back the next morning you wonder "what the hell just happened?!?"

Finally, I'm not Chunk Norris (yes, I just saw this advertised!) I don't think I have to actually say anything about this but I'll tell you what... well, I'm not Chuck Norris.


I get it's all about advertising and marketing and all that crap but as far as I'm concerned, you're trying to impress the wrong people! Software engineers aren't about showmanship. We're not about trying to seem hip and happening and all that. We're about getting it done and doing it well.

I also get that there are some instances when you need what may be defined as a rock star. However, if you're not planning on paying that person a heap of money to always be on the road at conferences, selling your brand subconsciously, then I think you're doing it wrong. Alternatively, maybe, a rock star is someone you're hiring because you're hiring that person... in which case, you're not really going to advertise for them!

As far as I'm concerned, there aren't many people that look at an advertised position and think to themselves "you know what? I am a rock star!". As far as I'm concerned, the people that look at your ad and get their ego stroked that way are exactly the kinds of people you shouldn't want to hire.

Stop please. For my sake. Stop stroking the wrong peoples' egos and stop making yourself look like you're more about marketing than you are about development.

Please?

Roaming in the US... Now that's the way to do it!

We just got back from a 4 day trip in Boston. Because a lot of the time my wife and I were going to be in separate parts of the city, we really needed to be able to contact each other. Suffice to say, we were dreading the roaming charges!

Having spoken to our current cell provider, we were looking at $1.50 / minute for voice, 60c / message for text and $5.00 / MB for data. A $50 package would have given us 50 minutes, 50 messages and 25MB of data, before going back to charges that were approximately half of the 'non package' prices.

Only 50 messages? The worst thing about that is that it's incoming and outgoing, so really it's only 25 messages in a way. This was still going to be expensive!

We started to think about prepaid SIMs, but trying to organise that was going to be a hassle. That is until I found Roam Mobility.

There is one prerequisite for using Roam and it's the same prerequisite for using other pre-paid SIMs... your phone needs to be unlocked as far as the network is concerned. This is fine for us as we had Nexus 4's that only cost us $50 to begin with :)

So here's the deal: with Roam, you can buy a SIM card for $20 (I bought mine at the local Telus store). Once activated, that card gives you a phone number based in the US (note that it also only works in the US). So long as you use it at least once a year, you can keep that SIM. Once it's activated, you buy a 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 day plan.

We opted for the 7 day 'Talk + Text + Data' plan and here's what we got:
- Unlimited talk within the US as well as to Canada
- Unlimited text within the US as well as to Canada
- A total of 700MB of data usage (for every day's worth of plan, you get 100MB of data)

How much? $27.95!

So for less than the $50 roaming package from our own provider, we got unlimited talk and text and all the data we needed / wanted. They even tell you how to set your phone up as a mobile hotspot for your laptop!

The coverage was no problem and it was probably the most simple process I have ever used for anything related to telecommunication.

So that's my tip: if you're roaming to the US, get an unlocked phone and jump onto Roam... I can't wait to travel that way again, just so that I can use it again :)

Not Going to NEPHP? Try Pandacodium Instead!

You may or may not have noticed that I'm heading to Boston next weekend for the Northeast PHP conference. You also may or may not have realised there was a little sarcasm in that last sentence.

But what are you going to do? Where are you going to be? What if I told you that you could attend a hackathon instead?

Well?

Pandacodium is an online, world-wide hackathon that's going to run for 48 hours starting on Friday, August 16th at 7PM.

I don't know if the theme changes every year, but either way, this one is going to be focussed on developing real-time web applications.

Although I've never been to a hackathon, and I'm probably going to miss the one in Charlottetown in a few weeks, it's something that I'm itching to do... and now you all can! Please, let me live through your adventures :)

Seriously: I urge everyone that can to take this opportunity to flex your coding muscle, stretch your comfort zone, meet new people and more importantly have a heap of fun! Head over to http://pandacodium.ca right now and sign up. If I weren't going to Boston, I'd be doing this.

Let me know if you're going to go in it... I want to hear all of the gory details!

NEPHP 2013: Don't Be STUPID, Grasp SOLID

This may be getting boring, but too bad... there are so many talks to see at Northeast PHP this year!

Anthony Ferrara is giving a talk this year titled 'Don't be STUPID, Grasp SOLID' (see http://northeastphp.org/talks/view/33/Don-t-Be-STUPID-Grasp-SOLID and https://joind.in/talk/view/8907).

This is another one of those talks that I think I need to concretely square away some issues I've been having with my code lately. When I first started writing code, I always had small, compact functions. However, somewhere between here and there I lost my way.

I started cramming random meaning into particular function parameters, for example. Depending on the combination of 46 different parameters, the function would do one of 2,500 things... just because it seemed right to use the same function name. This may be because of PHP's lack of function overloading, or it may not. Either way, I realise now how stupid it all was.

Elsewhere, my code started pulling in random static classes, using singletons from static function calls and the like... this is all bad news when you start realising the benefits of unit testing, for example, but in reality, and in my older age, I've realised it's just bad news no matter what.

So like I say: I've started to come back around to smaller functions and classes and already it's made a huge impact on the way I work. I can honestly say that changing that particular approach to my coding has probably saved me more time and given me more safety than any other 'tweak' I've done to my 'style' in the last 5 years. And now that I have a taste for it, I'm looking for more!

Other than the actual topic, I've heard some awesome things about Anthony himself, so it'll be great just to see him talk anyway.

Hopefully you will too!

NEPHP 2013: You Can UX Too: Avoiding the Programmer's User Interface

Just another talk I want to see in Boston this year at Northeast PHP 2013...

This talk is on a track that I must admit, I know pretty much nothing about. And to be honest, until recently I've tried to avoid it. But no longer! User Experience (UX) is definitely something I need to be on top of and conferences, talks and workshops are a perfect way to get on the way.

With this in mind, I'm looking forward to the talk 'You Can UX Too: Avoiding the Programmer's User Interface', to be given by Eryn O'Neil. If you want details, check out either http://northeastphp.org/talks/view/187/You-Can-UX-Too-Avoiding-the-Programmer-s-User-Interface or http://joind.in/talk/view/8931.

The reason this is going to be on the top of my 'UX exposure list' is specifically because it speaks directly to me. I am a programmer, no doubt about it, and this talk is addressing the simple (and dare I say obvious?) fact that UX is a problem for programmers. I'm really looking forward to getting an idea of how to take off my coding hat and stick on my UX hat easily, and hopefully more often.

For what it's worth, I'm not saying that I don't want to see any of the other UX talks. On the contrary, this whole realm of software is completely foreign to me and I really need to correct that.

And dare I give kudos to the conference itself for making sure to include this UX track? It's going to be fantastic to have such a wide audience at the one place... I'm looking forward to getting to talk to these 'UX-aware' attendees and finally being able to get an idea of how it all works.

NEPHP 2013: Agile in the Workplace

So another talk I'm looking forward to seeing this year at Northeast PHP is 'Agile in the Workplace', to be given by Michael Stowe (more details at http://northeastphp.org/talks/view/57/Agile-in-the-Workplace and https://joind.in/talk/view/8914).

To understand why I'm going to find this talk interesting, you have to know that I tend to be one of those people that learns way more through practical examples than I ever do through theory.

The concepts intrigue me, however all the reading in the world is not going to make it all fall together without real life exposure. Unfortunately that would mean finding and working with a group that practices agile correctly... which is not really an option for me. So instead, I'll take the second best thing: I'm going to listen to someone talking about it, and no doubt listen to stories about practical examples.

I'm looking forward to hearing the good and the bad about the process, and ways that I can avoid following those bad practices. For what it's worth, the reason I highlighted the word 'correctly' above is because from what I understand, 'agile' can very easily be a word that gets thrown around by groups, without actually being agile. Every story I've heard about these groups tends to imply that there is a very painful lesson to be learned about the difference between being agile and thinking you're being agile.

Hopefully, too, there may be a way to correctly ease a team into an agile workflow, which I believe would help everyone by being an evolution as opposed to a revolution.

Either way, I say 'viva la agile'. Or something like that... My French is not so good.

Could Second Item Auctions be Used for Ticket Sales?

Every time a big concert, game, show or whatnot goes on sale, we invariably read people complaining about scalpers taking all of the tickets and then jacking up the prices.

Firstly, let me try and summarise my take on both sides of the argument. The anti-scalper argument is that because scalpers are buying as many tickets as possible, and because their business revolves around the fact that they can get these tickets, it means that the scalpers are going to always try and be first to buy, and have a financial incentive to do so. That is to say, the fans have less of a chance to buy the tickets.

The pro-scalper argument is that basically it's the free market, baby! When scalpers can buy and sell tickets for a profit, then that indicates that the original ticket price was 'wrong', in that the sellers were leaving money on the table so to speak.

So with that being my understanding of the problem, I ask: what would happen if tickets were sold off in the form of a second item auction? A second item auction is when you are auctioning more than one identical item, and basically the winners are those people that bid the most... with the 'twist' being that all winners only pay the lowest winning bid.

For what it's worth, I always thought this was called a Dutch auction, but that link to Wikipedia actually says that a second item auction can be confused with a Dutch auction, so I don't feel so bad...

So off the bat, this sounds like a horrible idea: in theory the scalpers are cut out of the process, as those people that are willing to spend big will do that directly with the seller. The fans are probably screwed out of the process too, though, as they are likely going to be outbid.

Over time, though, I wonder if the prices would fall, as there is going to be a group of people that are bidding higher than they would like, just to make sure they get to go to the show? In my head, at least, I think that as this goes on for a little bit and scalpers are essentially squeezed out of the market, these people will find that they can slowly lower their bids and still get tickets.

Either way, it would definitely remove a lot of the incentive for the scalpers, and would even remove the argument for the existence of them: the whole 'the price is not what the market is willing to bear'.

And who knows? Maybe the other fans will be happier, just knowing that there isn't someone there, buying tickets from under them simply to make money. Or not...