June 5th, 2006
Often, whilst working with other programmers, I’ll make a suggestion or statement regarding an implementation choice for a given project. It surprises me how often I’ll hear responses that indicate an addition to sugar.
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June 5th, 2006
As part of what IT Operations does, we do a lot of software development. Roughly, about 50% of what we do is new work and about 50% involves working on existing codebases. When we do work on existing code, about half of the time we’re lucky enough to be working with the original authors or the current maintainers. During one project, one of the original authors of the codebase we were working on brought me a print out of some code he’d recently updated that didn’t produce the results he was after (it introduced a SEGFAULT, which was definitely a bit off the new feature he was trying to implement). The start of the conversation was the ever familiar: "I’ve been working on this forever and it simply fails in a way that doesn’t make sense - what’s wrong with my code?? Read the rest of this entry »
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June 4th, 2006
One of the things IT Operations does quite a lot of is Search Engine Optimisation. As a result, there are a few recurring themes that come up when we’re discussing the process with our clients:
- Isn’t there just some trick we can use to get our site on the first page of results?
- Who can we pay to put us in the #1 spot?
- Why is how we phrase and present our content so important?
Eventually, after giving truthful answers to these questions (”No”, “No one” and “Because algorithms are still rigid”), there’s a much more interesting question presented to us:
- How does Google actually work?
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