Jawed’s Blog

I was reading an article about Reasons to write bad code !!, the author was sharing his experience about having problems with some bad code, written by his senior colleague. He further elaborated that his fellow wrote bad code to avenge his company for stress and frustration. But I don’t agree with it completely because developer alone can’t be blamed for his bad code and there might be very few exceptions that will avenge the company. My argument is; what the project manager, team lead or test team was doing when the developer was writing that creepy code. These problems could have been mitigated early in the project cycle if you had conducted peer reviews, implemented proper coding standards and verified them during testing etc.

You can’t develop quality product in tight schedules and stressful environment. Many companies often ignore long term consequences over short term gains. Quality is a company driven activity, unless company is not focused on developing quality product, people will continuously face such problems.

So what are good practices of developing quality in the code, here are some practices that will help you develop good code and quality product.

• Quality is a company driven activity. (Very important)
• You should allocate justifiable time for each activity in the project life cycle.
• Encourage peer reviews among the developers and team lead should be responsible to look after this activity.
• You should have a quality assurance team capable of doing white box testing, performance and load test etc.
• Follow good coding standards and verify those standards during testing and peer reviews. Automated testing tools for verifying coding standards save lot of time.
• Encourage your employees to learn new technologies, we all know older technologies have deficiencies and limitations.
• Company should try to integrate new versions of the technologies, its not always required but it helps.
• Unit testing must be compulsory for developers.
• When you have time review your own code, you will find few issues yourself. I personally experienced that when developers do load testing they improve their code a lot.
• Train your employees, specially inexperienced ones, on how to write good code and about good practices. To argue about code is bad, you must know what is good.

There might be more practices that will help you improve your code and skills. Please use comments to extend the list or argue about the practices .

Firefox 3 has been launched and with notable impact. Downloads crossed the 10 million mark on day 2. Last download count, while writing this post, was approx. 13 millions.

To promote Firefox 3, Mozilla has created Download Day campaign designed to persuade users to download Firefox 3 the same day as it ships in an effort to set the Guinness World Record as the most downloaded software in 24 hours. For users who want to display pride in their effort to help set a world record, Mozilla is offering certificates. By going to http://spreadFirefox.com and clicking on the ‘ Flaunt It‘ tab, Firefox 3 Download Day participants can print out a personalized certificate.

Some of the features Firefox 3 offers:

• Password Manager: Remember site passwords without ever seeing a pop-up.
• One-Click Bookmarking: Bookmark, search and organize Web sites quickly and easily.
• Improved Performance: View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.
• Smart Location Bar: Find the sites you love in seconds—enter a term for instant matches that make sense.
• Instant Web Site ID: Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity.
• Full Zoom: See any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.
• Platform-Native Look & Feel: Browse with a Firefox that’s integrated into your computer’s operating system.

Firefox will soon enter into the mobile market with Mozilla’s mobile web browser, which is under development as part of Firefox 4 platform and code named Fennec. The team is planning to release the first alpha version by the end of August and a viable beta by year’s end. But Fennec won’t launch until 2009 and is expected to reach another milestone on June 20 with the release of M4.

I was reading an article “11 keys to success at work“, the author jotted down 11 keys that will lead to success at work and job satisfaction. These 11 keys are :

1. CONFIDENCE
2. CURIOSITY
3. DECISIVENESS
4. EMPATHY
5. FLEXIBILITY
6. HUMOR
7. INTELLIGENCE
8. OPTIMISM
9. PERSEVERANCE
10. RESPECT
11. SELF-AWARENESS

Getting success might depend upon how well you observe these keys to success. Let see how successful I could be at work, by making these keys part of attitude and skills.

Few days back on of my friend sent me an email with following picture and I think this has to be the best illusion ever created or I have seen.

If you look at the above images from your seat in front of the computer, Mr. Angry is on the left, and Mr. Calm is on the right. Get up from your seat, and move back 5-6 feet, and WOW!! they switch places. Click on the image to view larger version. When the size of the image increases the distance to switch places also increases. Give your self a try.

Does this prove that we sometimes may not be seeing what’s actually there?

I have just finished with configuring the code prettifier on one of my site. It was so easy to implement and took hardly 5 minutes to complete the configuration.

Code Prettifier supports many language syntaxes, like Java, C, C++, PHP, HTML, Bash Scripts etc.

Here are the steps to setup Code Prettifier on your website running wordpress blog.

1. Download code prettifier distribution.
2. Upload the script and stylesheets in your theme folder (you will need to adjust the paths in the script and link tag)

   <link href="prettify.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
   <script type="text/javascript" src="prettify.js"></script>

3. Add onload="prettyPrint();" to your document’s body tag.
4. Put your code snippet in following tags and it will highlight the code automatically.

   <pre class="prettyprint">...</pre>
   or
   <code class="prettyprint">...</code>

Thats all you have to put in your theme to get this lovely highlighted source code features in your blog.