Category: Focus
I am a huge fan of open source development. From the developer side of things, it means there are limitless tools at my disposal for creating the next knock-your-socks off application. I can build just about anything with insanely powerful libraries of code that the big guys like Microsoft can’t touch. It’s an amazing power, and one that’s attracted more than a few good developers.
I was once called a “creative genius.” Not by myself. Not by my parents. It was a random comment from a complete stranger on the other side of the globe. He’d read my work online, perused my portfolio, and looked through other tidbits of miscellany that I’d scattered about the Internet. I tried my best to play the compliment down at the time, but really, it made me feel good.
Lately, though, I feel like I’ve done nothing worthy of even a passing glance. My “creative genius” has waned somewhat of late, and I place the blame on the circumstances of my career and my inability to recognize the ebbs and flows of my real-world education.
A few weeks ago, I published a tutorial regarding using the Google Reader API in PHP projects. Since that time, Google has changed the authentication portion of their API somewhat, so I need to revise my instructions just a bit. And some day in the future, I’ll even post a tutorial on how to use oAuth with the Google API as well.
I was taught some time ago to always focus on decoupling my code. Your server and the client (browser) should not need to know anything about the structure of one another. They can pass information back and forth, but that should be the full extent of their integration. There are several reasons for this, but the most important of which is modularity – you can drop features or entire sections of code from one without damaging the other.
Last week, I proposed the idea that each of us is walking around with a model of the world inside our heads. Every experience we have, every object we see, and every event we witness help build and refine this model, giving us the ability to predict future behavior and make decisions based on past knowledge. It’s a great theory when you think about software development – building an “intelligent” script becomes a matter of giving it the ability to learn from past events and make corrections.
But you can also use this model in marketing … perhaps even more effectively.