Howard Young

“Not Invented Here” (NIH). This is one of the biggest hurdles developers have to overcome when reusing components, modules, functions or snippets in the production software. I’ve run across it my entire development career — developers simply do not like to use software that they don’t write and own — and of course, I’m am guilty as the next developer.

So today I’m starting out with a positive outlook and tossing out our in-house PHP Framework (FIZZI) that we’ve been using for MustFindit and replacing it with CakePHP. It’s taking too long to develop MustFindit and extending and adapting FIZZI for MustFindit’s requirements will basically kill the project.

Why CakePHP? I’ve considered Rails, Symfony and quite a few more; however, CakePHP seems like the best fit with our current technology, design and knowledge base for a MVC architecture. This is a big plus since we want to expedite development process and keep the learning curve down as much as possible.

Over the next few days, I hope to present our findings on CakePHP and if it is a viable Development Framework for PHP and our projects.

I was checking out MyBlogLog stats today and noticed that it was over 65 days since my last post. At first I was a little upset that they switched over to Yahoo (YHOO:NASDAQ) ID’s to sign in to get to my account. However, it was a painless and transparent move. My hats off to the software team MyBlogLog and Yahoo team!

Sixty-five days ago I was working for QLogic Corporation (QLGC:NASDAQ) and now I’m working for LSI Corporation (LSI:NYSE). I believe that the move is good and I look forward for a long relationship with LSI. LSI is a really exciting company to work for and I should be busy for years to come…

My plan was to work at QLogic until the ripe age of 65. (Only 3 dog years to go!) But plans change and sometimes for the better.

Photo: (c) Michael Bretherton

I never met a software developer that didn’t drink coffee (or tea). Lots of coffee. This is due to the demanding hours we keep. Eighteen hour days is not unusual especially during crunch-time.

I love running out to Starbucks, Coffee Bean or now my favorite Bad Ass Coffee around 3 or 4 in afternoon to keep me going until later that night.

But every morning, I drink Equal Exchange Coffee. According to their site:

Equal Exchange’s mission is to build long-term trade partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relationships between farmers and consumers….

What this means, as a consumer, you get a great price for coffee, and as a farmer, they get substantial higher profits for their product. Since the middle man is removed, more profit goes to the farmers and workers whom live in poverty stricken countries.

Buy and drink lots of coffee. It will make you a better programmer!

– Howard Young

It’s been a busy evening trying to finalize the design for MustFindit. If you’re a software developer, you know that nothing is final and there’s always fiddling to get that extra bit of performance out of your creation.

I’m well past the MustFindit alpha launch date of June 15, 2007 but with these latest changes, things should go much smoother now.

Anyway, I was inspired and started hacking out some png’s and updated the CSS to make everything flow with the backend database. I would like to get the blog up and running by the 4th of July so we can start marketing the site for beta users.

– Howard Young