It's been a long time since I've been plugged into any sort of developer community. Epochs essentially in Internet time. I made some tentative steps yesterday morning and evening to get back into the swing of things as part of the side project I talked about in my previous post. The first hour or two was fairly frustrating. $15 wasted on a book that though only a couple of years old is largely out of date and a dozen web sites perused and discarded because they didn't contain timely information either. This is a pretty good example of why search is rapidly becoming obsolete and curation and discovery are gaining popularity. Locating all the worlds information is great, but if it's mostly obsolete and difficult to sort through the utility in that is limited.
Another thing I discovered is that a lot of sample code is short on error detection. I'm not complaining since I paid zero for the code in question but it was a good reminder to me that it's not enough to just call a function and assume everything is going to go well. Better I be reminded of that early in the process rather than later.
It may not seem that way at the time but I tend to think that the worst case scenario is really when everything goes right early. When the wheels finally start to come off you're just not prepared. I think I prefer that mildly paranoid feeling I get when everything is finally going well.
I did manage to generate about a hundred lines of code yesterday. It connects and downloads some data. I've started work on a database schema and should have a first version of the initial portion of my project by the end of the day. I also have my Cisco CCNP switch exam tomorrow which I've been putting off for awhile. I'm not going to do that again, so I may get squeezed for time due to the need to do a bit more studying.
When I wrote the bulk of the above I was sitting in the passenger seat of our trusty Honda Fit. The iPad is great for some things but coding isn't one of them. This is particularly true when said code lives on a VM that isn't remotely accessible. I'm going to need to do something about that. Since I couldn't code I figured it was a good time to work on the BLOG. I hate to waste time.
The good thing about the book I bought is it is the Kindle edition so at least I found out it wasn't going to be very useful sooner rather than later. E-Books are one of many reasons that product development times have become much shorter in the Internet age.
One bummer for yesterday was that I missed out on the $99 clearance HP tablets. I figure there is a good chance that somebody will port Android to them and for $99 it seemed worth it to grab a potentially useful historic foot note.
Time to get back to work.
Image via Wikipedia
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