Check your code 6 months later...

When you make something for a living, whether it's wood carvings, SQL reports, digital art, software, or anything else, you get better every day you do it, even if you don't know it.  Have you ever looked at someone else's work and rolled your eyes at a simple mistake they made, or how they did something useless or, worse, counterproductive in part of their work?

Well, that's you today.  You can pick mistakes that less experienced people can make.  Well you used to be less experienced, so why don't you look over some of your own code from six months ago, a year ago, or longer?  You can use all those months and years of experience to make that older code better, more efficient, and smoother.  Just try not to pick on yourself too much for making those terrible mistakes.

You are your own worst tester...

Today's a quick thought is rather simple.  You wrote some amazing code and you test it over and over and over, and you're confident it's great.  Guess what, unless you're the 1%, you missed something.  I don't know what it is, and you certainly don't know what it is, but go find someone else, either a friend, or a coworker or boss, or Alpha/Beta testers.

If you didn't think of something in your code and in your design, then you're not going to think of it in your testing so get someone with fresh eyes to look at it and find all those use cases you never thought of.

You're the first and last tester, but probably not the most important one, so get that other pair of eyes looking!

Crowdsourcing...

Kickstarter is one of the most popular sites for a major internet sensation called Crowdfunding, but I'm more personally interested in crowdsourcing.  What's the difference you might ask?  Well crowdfunding is a concept where you have multiple people donating money to a cause or project.  This can include donations because of generosity, preorders, or other vested interest in the project that is being done.

Crowdsourcing is where one person has a project or product but rather than asking for funds, they're asking for support in the way of advice, suggestions, testing, and things like that.  This concept here is that it's a sharing of ideas and the hope is that if you don't know how to tackle a certain problem, someone else will.

Then you have some that are really the best of both worlds.  Most Kickstarter campaigns employ an aspect of both.  First they ask for funds, but then they take the users that have donated funding, which means they have a vested interest, and invite them to forums, play/beta testing, and more.  This lets the first customers also assist in the development of the project and makes them deeply involved in it, and thus they are more likely to release a better product.

So check out kickstarter, find something you like, and get involved even if it's just for one dollar.  You might be surprised at what you find, and the right projects means you didn't just buy something, you got involved in a community and you're building something pretty amazing!

Networking, not just a wire anymore

Just a quick something to think about.  For years Networking meant one thing to an IT person and something completely different to the rest of the world.  Well here's the problem, IT professionals need Networking as much as everyone else, and I don't mean the electronic kind.

Meet people, go to events, both business social and conventions or expos when you can.  Hand out your card, and make contacts.  Those people could save your job in a pinch if you need resources you don't have, or, worst case scenario, they can get you a new one if you're in the market.

So be friendly, practice your handshake, and get out there!  It's like dating, only less emotional and easier on the wallet.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Sometimes a simple product is loved because it does something simple quickly and efficiently.  Very few features, not a lot of variations, and basic tools that are wrapped around one or a few simple use cases.

As a developer, it's hard to not say "but it could also..." and start building more onto it, and more functions, and a prettier interface, and so on.  The problem is that more features means more complex.  More complex means more load times and more options, and more options means more clicks and menus just to get back to what I used to do fine before.

Evernote is a perfect example of this.  I used to just take notes in text documents and save them to my desktop.  This worked fine for a while but before long I had way too many notes and most of them were called "note" or something useless because I was in a rush while saving.

Evernote was a simple program to take notes, organize them, put them in folders, and open/edit/save as quick if not quicker than my usual text editor.  Well Evernote went through an overhaul and now takes 30+ seconds to load.  When I'm just jotting down a phone number, I don't want to wait 40 seconds to type for 5, so now I'm looking for another software package that does what I want without the extra features.

The point I'm making is that you should consider what the primary use of your software is, and keep that in the forefront of your development efforts.  If you want lightweight, then stop adding features, for one.

I'm not saying Evernote is a bad software now, but it's not what it was, and that means it's no longer for me.

NoSleep - Close your macbook lid if you wanna

It may be a simple thing, but I've had issues with the idea that windows based laptops have an option to close the lid and not go into standby, but OSX clearly doesn't.  What does this mean?  Well if you're doing a long download, or running a vent server, or doing anything that doesn't require your attention to be on your laptop, you still can't close the lid and put it away somewhere.

No, this doesn't mean to close your laptop while it's 3d rendering some amazing animation while it's buried under a pile of blankets, but it is useful to take off the desk, put next to you, or just generally get it out of the way.

Enter NoSleep, a wonderful, free OSX app that adds a cute little icon to the bar at the top of your screen.  Click it to turn it on or off, on, and your lid will darken when closed but not go into standby/sleep mode.  Turn it off, and then lid closing is just like it used to be.

My review for this app is that it's lightweight, and works.  There aren't a lot of features, but there don't have to be.  It's easy to toggle, it's free, and in everything except OSX Lion it worked perfectly.

If you miss the windows ability to close your laptop, then hurry up over to NoSleep and catch your ZZs!

Don't Forget the R!

In many companies, the development team is referred to as the R&D team, Research and Development.  Sometimes as a developer I feel bad when I end up either starting, or debugging, a project and get caught up in "Research" mode.

Here's the key, don't feel bad.  If you're a trained, skilled developer then you're likely researching faster about your chosen field than someone else could, so you're still doing your job, and still "earning your keep" even though the research time doesn't usually bear visible results.

So don't mess around, but if don't undervalue the importance of Research in trying to solve a problem or create a solution where there wasn't one before...