Software Engineering

When hosting an Open Source software project you want to keep things simple and cheap. I was struggling to figure out where I was going to put my SNAPSHOTs and site for a simple BOM striping plugin I had written and was hosting at Google Code. I came across this article but it assumes you are going to use Subversion. I prefer Mercurial so I came up with a similar method.

I just read The Common Denominator of Success by Albert N. E. Grey. Please take the time to read it now as I will be referring to concepts in it. My boss, Ashley, had suggested it as an inspirational piece. As I read the piece I was struck by how relevant it is to so much more than just Life-Insurance salesmanship. As he discussed some of the things that insurance salesmen do not like to do I started to list off in my head the things that Programmers do not like to do but should do if they want to be successful.

Ran into a problem when I was maintaining a customer's site today. They wanted to upload 10 - 20 MB movies as attachments to their Drupal blog posts. The standard limit set in Drupal is 2MB. I changed the setting to no avail. There was a note at the bottom stating that my PHP settings limited the upload to 4MB. So I did a search and come up with this post. So I changed my upload_max_filesize setting to "20M" this still did not work. The problem is that PHP also limits the post size and my default config limited post size to 8MB.

I just read the article linked above and I have to tell you I am never surprised at how often I hear old ideas repackaged as new ones and then marketed aggressively like they were some kind of handed down wisdom. The truth is, SOA adds very little but a buzz word. Grady Booch was talking about loose coupling being imperative for programming in the large, as he put it, back in 1994. Back in 2000 the buzz was "Component" architectures and further back it was "Object-Oriented". The problem is not with the technologies, it is with the people.