Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer – my everyday fights with reality

I think almost all programmers, and web developers aren’t any different kind of them, come at one point to the situation when they have to build their work environment. From what you can see on various web sites usually they divide into two groups:

• Vim advocates
• IDE fans

I have to admit that for a long time I belonged to the first part – I was using basic text editor, all I needed was syntax coloring and ftp features. Then one day I started to work for Foothold and they wanted me to use Zend Studio. They even were so generous that they provided the license at no cost to me :-).

At the beginning it was pretty hard to get used to that system. It was written in Java. As you know the only advantage of Java (especially on slower machines) is it’s cross-platform nature. It took me almost three months to finally get all thing working, including the finally bought secondary monitor and faster computer with more RAM (if you don’t have at least 768MB it will freeze from time to time). But now the work is almost a pleasure.

More – I can’t imagine developing ANY more complicated site (like CMS or mentioned above A.W.A.R.D.S system) without the variable watchers, breakpoints, step by step debugging.

It’s like Polish way of driving cars – everybody prefer stick shift until they actually try the automatic one.

Technorati Tags: IDE, text editor, Foothold, Zend Studio

Recently I have the questionable pleasure to work with some Indian programmers who were hired to help our team with getting thing wrapped up before deadlines. I won’t describe results, but will throw some thoughts about Indian programmers.

Indian programmers are proud. They are so proud the even the smallest suggestion that they are doing something wrong sounds to them as huge affront.

Indian programmers have perfect memory. They can remember every single line of the code they ever wrote so there is no need to write documentation or even comments in the code.

Indian programmers work is faultless. If something does not work it’s for sure because of that stupid Polish programmer who dares to tell them what they should do.

And last but not least. They are childish.

There is though one big advantage – they are cheap.

As usually – the choice is yours.

Disclaimer: I have nothing in general against Indian people – I know many of them and they are ok. All except the programmers.

As I needed to have my home HVAC server always reachable and keeping in mind that it’s on a dial-up connection (dynamic IP) I decided to build virtual private network. The main goal is to get the home computer visible from the server as it was in local network. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than it seems. Thanks to detailed HOWTO it took me less than 1h to build working connection.

As it’s to easy to do and to long to describe I won’t post detailed description. Just go to the howto and follow the instructons step by step.

It wasn’t that bad. Only one high priority error which took me over 5h to solve. It figured out that there was % char missing at the end of sql statement. Urghhhhh.

Today’s big day. Bunch of clients go live.

It wouldn’t be a problem but today’s portion uses part of the system I’m working on for last two weeks. Recently bug squashing party was moved to level 3 – we actually started to create something.

I’m scared to come tomorrow to work…