Decided to take a break from the screaming children tonight. Some people say that here has some bad areas, being out alone at night in a place like this could have consequences. Maybe I stick to the right areas, maybe those people exaggerate. Doesn’t matter. Short sleeves, short pants, short socks, long board.

It’s been awhile. I rolled my ankle the last time I was out, and have been dealing with murmurings of a shin-splint on my pushing leg. Doesn’t matter. I’m ground-floor.

The ipod’s been broken for weeks. Abstract art from freed(!) liquid crystals. Doesn’t matter. I know how to feel it out, at least enough to get it to shuffle. Tonight’s shuffle was beautiful and appropriate for my first night boarding in awhile. Fate can be fun like that, in the way that presents you with slow solitary piano, delicious post-rock and the illest of hip hop at just the right moment.

It feels good to be on the streets, I’m not planning a big ride (haha I never do but they happen often) and I know the smoothest pavement near my place. Shaking the dust off of these creaky bones happens faster than I expect. It didn’t matter.

The streets are mostly empty, and the sky is perfect. Palm trees and powerlines silhouetted against the gradient of a subduing sky and the light pollution (and I do me pollution) of the bustle that surrounds these neighborhoods. I guess that doesn’t matter much, either. Blacker still is the asphalt, and I’m happy

It’s fun to feel like a kid in your twenties. Slaloming the paint on the street, taking big corners down low, hitting the banks, attempting (and failing) tricks. If this place had hills I wouldn’t be home yet. Everything’s smooth and quiet, these streets belong to me. This is my place in the world.

Cruising at about 15, I stretch as tall as I can go. Sometimes it’s upsetting to think that I’ll be moving away from everything I grew up with. Sometimes it’s upsetting to think the opposite. But there’s a lot of roads out there, and I’m not going to be on this planet nearly as long as I’d like to be. But this sense of movement, of freedom, of fresh new experiences, that’s a constant I can live with. I’ve made it this far, I want to keep going. These are the things I think about when carving the concrete at night, as the rest of the world doesn’t matter for a bit.

You’ve got to work in teams, or at least you’ve got to work with the idea that someone OTHER THAN YOURSELF is going to be working with your code at some point. I’m sure there are some people out there developing some crazy proprietary stuff that will never release their code to anyone but the client.

I haven’t blogged in a bit, but today’s boiled my blood enough that I kind of had to.

If you don’t code, just wait for my next post.

And without further ado: Danny Iachini, since you’re the only one in the intersection of “reads my blog” and “codes a lot” (at least that’s apparent to me)

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So I’m doing this project that was made awhile ago by some guy I’ve never met (thank goodness) and I’ve been plenty mouthy about my issues with this project. It’s a management system for a global company to keep track of their products and statuses and servicing and stuff like that. It also includes an RMA system. I inherited most of the code, which is script-based, and went to work patching things up and adding a few little functions here and there.

Sadly, no two coders are alike, but I think that most coders have common ideas about what is efficient, scalable, and elegant. I am working with code that is none of these things.

1. First off my number one problem with this code, is the goddamn whitespace. For any non-coders reading this, whitespace is sort of like indenting your paragraphs in a word document. it makes it easy to read, easy to see where paragraphs start and end, and you’re quickly able to see the details when browsing quickly. Whitespace is a programmers best friend. This guy doesn’t use it. No tabbing inward, although sometimes random spaces are thrown in to sort of emulate the idea of whitespace without it being consistant at all.
2. Now, I don’t know if this is a valid complaint, but I’ve always coded php using echos. So, in other words, I echo out what I need in the dynamic parts of the page, interrupting strings to concatenate variables into it where they’re needed. This means that I’ve got solid blocks of PHP embedded in whatever other code I’m working with. This guy does the opposite. He interrupts a huge big list of html (that all gets processed by the server) with multiple sets of php-openers and closers for things like end-brackets and if-statements. ugh. Not only does this make it ugly, segmented, and longer/more taxing than necessary, but coupled with the lack of whitespace, i have NO clue where one function will end and another begins. It’s horrid.
3. This guy’s variable names are full of capital letters, underscores, and all sorts of other fun crap that I have to hit the shift-key for. Thanks for taking up my time because you want to be extra accurate in naming this column Product_Name instead of simply productname.
4. The database. Ugh, I don’t even want to get into it. There’s more redundancy per table than I’ve seen anywhere lately. A good example is in the RMA system. There are flags for steps of the RMA (it being received, investigated, and returned), as well as dates for when these processes were completed. What I don’t get is why the flags need to be there. It’s an extra set of columns in the table used for determining if something had been done yet. YET you could just as easily have a script investigate that for you just by testing to see if the cell is empty or not. That’s just one example. There’s tons.
5. Error messages are passed through request variables in the URL. When’s the last time you were ever at http://a-site.com/?I’m sorry you can’t view this page because you’re not logged in. ?? ugh.
6. I don’t know the previous author’s grudge with more than one file, seeing as every file has about 1000 lines of crap that could easily be split into function-specific files. Instead of edit_products.php, why not just have edit_product1, edit_product 2, and so on…

Well that’s it. I’m done ranting. I feel better now.

Oh yeah there are california videos and stuff if you can find them