Download - Resisting The Feature Creature
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Resisting the feature creature
Christian Heilmann
Geek Meet, Romania, November 2008
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We are developers.
I useVI!
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And as developers we have one thing that always keeps us from making our lives a
*lot* easier.
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The feature creature
Creature:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salacious_B._Crumb
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The feature creature is that little advisor we have in our
head...
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...who gives us bad ideas.
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Like, what?
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“You can do that in 5 lines of code – after all you don’t
need to test before you apply nowadays”
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“Documentation is for pussies, real men learn from
source code”
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“JavaScript sucks, just write a wrapper that generates
JavaScript from Ruby and translates via Python”
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“Go ahead and add that hack. It only has to work in IE6
anyways.”
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“Comments in your own language make a lot of sense.
If you use English, who’d know where code ends and
the comment starts?”
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“Yeah, Yahoo and Google have a solution for this, but
you are better and can create a smaller one!”
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All of this stuff is very dangerous.
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Right now, the market is going
downhill...
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...which means that the quality of your work is
measured by how fast and efficient you are.
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I’ve given a talk about this some weeks ago in Paris.
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http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/working-in-the-now-presentation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lejoe/3035690503/
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Where I showed people how to save time and money by
using things that are available for free.
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Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
Page widgets (things not in HTML): YUI, jQuery UI
Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
YouTube API
Amazon S3 for storage
Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
Mechanical Turk
http://www.wait-till-i.com/2008/11/14/paris-web-working-in-the-now/
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Basically this could be the same talk...
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...but this is more about the underlying issue...
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...of us as developers not trusting other people’s
solutions.
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We all work on solving the same problems.
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And some of us solve problems for large, distributed teams.
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In large corporations.
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Or even for a massive audience.
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And yet as developers we tend not to trust solutions of
those companies.
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Building web applications and web sites is much more
than coding a solution.
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It means working in a constantly changing
environment.
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Constantly under attack by hackers and spammers.
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Collaboratively fixing these problems and releasing
patches and new versions are a solution for that problem.
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Do you have the time and dedication to do the same for
all of your hand-rolled solutions?
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I have written a massive amount of bad code in my
life.
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I also find myself doing work that in retrospect doesn’t
make much sense or is available as a native method.
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The point is that as a developer I act first and then start reading the instructions.
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This, I found, holds me back.
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SDKs and documentation are built for a reason.
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They make the access to systems and building
software on top of them much easier.
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Case in point.
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Say you want to help your clients find good keywords to promote their product online.
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You can do some research, surf all the competitors’ sites
and note down the descriptions, keywords and
titles.
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You can be a man and use CURL to write a script to do
that.
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Or you can keep your eyes open and check if there is an
API for that.
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http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
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http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&appid=...
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http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/donkeys?format=xml&view=keyterms&appid=...
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All you need to do is getting the top 20, analyzing the keyword frequency and
create a top 20.
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http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/11/boss_keywords.html
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Then you take YUI CSS grids, and spend 30 minutes playing
with colours and fonts.
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So in essence, what I am saying is...
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There is a *lot* of *awesome* *free* and
*good* stuff out on the web.
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Spend some time reading up on it and using it.
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People like me spend a lot of time convincing people in big
companies that giving free access to our systems is a
great thing...
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...to help developers and small companies become a
success by not having to repeat the same mistakes we
did.
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Our main argument for all these free goodies is that gifted people like you will
create things faster and better.
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Because you are not hindered by a big corporate machine
and red tape.
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So help us show the system that innovation works outside
if the inside helps the community.
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Creature:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salacious_B._Crumb
Christian Heilmann
http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org
http://twitter.com/codepo8
THANKS!