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Pat MagnanKLZ Innovations Ltd. |
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January 08 RSS APIWell, started a roughed out aggregator program that parses and then puts into our News system items from an RSS feed.
I started with the syndicated feed I have here, and will expand testing to other sites/feeds as development continues.
The screenie is a bit gross (scaled in the browser)., but you get the idea..
January 07 RSS aggregatorJust starting to think this project out a bit.. talked with others, it would appear that we're missing not much tech to do this.
Will try parsing some rss feeds and filling fields of one of our internal db objects as a document format, in future, consider that
category from RSS feed is arbitrary, so will have to consider mapping them to ANPA cat codes. Post doc to wire that is
the essence of an rss story to our wires.
... January 04 Big picture software designI've learned that I am not any different than any other developer that is still in training (does it ever end? :)).
Most of us think that as smart people, we should be able to write every bit of technology needed to accomplish
the business end goals ourselves.. there is a huge folly there, instead of copying what another has already done,
and re-inventing the wheel, it is far better to harness what is there today, and focus on the most effective business
solution available, not the most efficient program that solves the business problem.
There is a difference -- economy can be had when we leverage existing technologies, not fight them or make our own
that is just as unsatisfactory, as we an't all spend 30 million dollars in R&D. How I grow to be a more effective employee..I've had a great opportunity to reflect on the past few years, how I thought I was being mistreated, etc.
I think every employee at one time or another tries to push the blame for their happiness on 'being underpaid'.. I think that upon more sober reflection, perhaps it's more about whether you'd rather be comfortable financially or a risk taker. If you don't want to be comfortable, then quit working for others, if you do, shut up, suck it up and just be the best employee you can be every day (even if that means you're giving 110% some days at 90% others, just approach it daily).
I don't know if this makes me a happy human, but it sure helps me stop being an unhappy one....
January 03 New year's reflections..
I've always been a little bit obsessed with the idea, that my job as a developer or analyst, etc is actually not so much to teach people about how computers were when i was small, but rather to make them useful to people who don't know how they work. This seems obvious, but as we tend to pride knowledge skill and ability a bit more than we always should as an industry, it's refreshing to try a new set of assumptions.. and I find that I know now why some seemingly incomprehensible changes to the shell of the platform we develop code for is changing.. the time for computers being something that only someone that is 'computer literate' can use is past.. developers who want to be effective as I (and most of us surely do), will benefit from discarding their assumptions about why everyone else isn't as smart as them (which is a pretty weak proposition really, as I'm also not as good a doctor as my doctor, but since he doesn't expect I'm a doctor in training to be an effective patient.. I should perhaps reconsider that if it seems awkward to me, it's going to be a really bad piece of software... Cheers, happy 2008! |
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