Poker House Rules
I thought it might be beneficial to write up our house rules for Poker and provide a little insight as to why these rules exist. In our house, this is how we play. In your house, you decide. That’s why they’re called “House Rules”. I’m not going to provide the full rules of Poker, hand rank, etc. I’ll expect the gentle reader to familiarize themselves with those.
No Extra Buy In’s
A “buy in” occurs only once at the beginning of each game. The reason for this is simple. I would prefer to play in a number of shorter games that start with all opponents at equal footing than loose a number of times in one longer game. Once you are on a loosing streak in a no-limit, multiple buy in game the same big stack player can continually force others off the pot – all – night – long. That’s just annoying, it’ s boring and if you’re going to play for fun, this house rule helps immensely. On occasion, a small stack player may double up off of the big stack, but how often does that happen?
Out Dealer Motivation
One of my favorite house rules is called, “Out Dealer Motivation”. This came about for two reasons. If you’re playing a number of shorter games then what do you do with those players who bust out early and can’t buy in again? In our house we let them play the role of dealer. If more than one player busts out early, the two can rotate the role. The motivation for the out dealer(s) is simple too. In the event of a split pot, the player dealing will receive an equal share of the split pot and get back in the game.
This also keeps the out players focused on the game and at the table. Otherwise they might just wander away and then you have to go and track them down before you can get the next game started.
30 Chip Limit/No Limit
All players, in all games, start with 30 chips… regardless if it’s a $1.00 or $20 buy-in. This is a time thing. In the years we’ve been playing it’s been discovered that 30 chips divided by 5 players will take an average of 1 hour to play a full game. Aside from that, it’s no limit.
Raising Blinds on the Out
I hate it when the blinds go up right when I hit the big blind. It happens with stunningly weird regularity. So, to avoid this, I introduced the rule that the blinds will double when a player goes out. If the game only lasts about an hour and you set a time to blind up, you’ll be raising the blinds every 10 minutes and that’s a pain. Now I just have to figure out why players always bust out right before I’m to play big blind 
it didn’t solve the issue, but everyone seems to like the rule.
No Side Betting
When someone calls all in, you can call or fold. If you’re already in for more than that player bet then take your chips back. There is no side betting for two reasons. The first is simply because it’s complicated, it’s tricky to keep everyone focused on what they’re actually betting and frankly, secondly, it’s the side betting that causes issues, arguments and in one instance – fist fights. I rule out side betting because it turns gentlemen and ladies into monsters and it seriously slows down the game.
New Silly Deck
Every game should start with a brand new, still wrapped in a sealed box, deck of good playing cards. I think the deck of cards should have some kind of silly factor to help set the tone that this is a friendly game. The deck of cards should be unwrapped and opened in front of all players as a sign of respect.
D&D is Dead
Tomorrow was the day I would have started a D&D campaign. The first one in a decade or two. A bi-monthly (twice a month) game session on Sunday afternoons would have been fun. It would have been immensely entertaining. It would have brought together the old group of friends and a few new ones. Alas, that was to be my tomorrow. The game never took off as nobody could commit to it. Nobody had any interest in playing D&D.
I wanted to play 2nd Ed., but Sam wanted to play 3rd ed. Shane wanted to play 4th ed because he finally bought a copy. Max wanted to revive his old Shadowrun character and Anthony had some strange desire to play Boot Hill. We lost track of the Vampire players some 10 years ago. They left the D&D group to pursue the blood sucking, Vampire the Masquerade LARP. Mark had a plumber coming in to fix his defunct bathroom in the basement, on a Sunday afternoon, and several others couldn’t even be bothered to return my call or email.
I am at a lost to explain why 2nd ed, 3rd ed, 3.5ed and 4th ed Dungeons and Dragons have split such a decisive rift between the players that nobody can play anymore.
90% of the rules get thrown out the window in my games. You basically need a couple of dice and the willingness to roll whatever, whenever the DM happens to say roll ‘em. There are very few tables, very few maps, very few rules. This is not how we once played, with Sean quiting rules from page 25, paragraph 3, sentence 2 of the DMG and several other players making sure they had the latest expansions or supplementary materials that supported the min/maxing of their characters. I would huddle behind my DM screen with 3 binders full of tables, tables and tables… both the 1st and 2nd editions of the Monsterous Manuals. I had a plethora of maps prepared in advance and could throw down 12 different bars or Inns without hesitation. I had the rules memorized back then. I could make a character without the tables and recite to you the entire contents of the Strength table for any given attribute. I knew combat rounds like the back of my hand and, at one point, I knew how many spells a first level Wizard started with.
This is not how I play. Who cares about the rules anymore? I guess most players do and that’s why they don’t want to play. They don’t know what the rules of the game are before they enter the game and so how can I expect them to play? This last question is mostly important if you’re one of those players who insist on min/maxing your characters.
The rules for all the editions and versions of D&D can be broken down to skill checks, attribute checks or a roll on a table out of a book somewhere. Does it matter if you’re rolling D20 system, 3rd Ed. percentile or 1d8 for damage? It’s all the same at the heart and soul of the system.
So this is where Xander would pop into the conversation and pump up Castles and Crusades. The rebuilding or re-purposing of the heart of a system that was once the only choice of a game to play. But again, I think he misses the point. Someone who wants play AD&D or OD&D or 2nd ED, or 3rd Ed. or 3.5e or 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons – do not want to play anything else with “D&D” in the name – let alone something that doesn’t even have the brand in the title.
Bollux. Who would like to play a fantasy based, table top, role playing game I like to Generica? You want to play 2nd Ed AD&D? Generica is exactly like it! You want to play 3.5e? Generica is exactly the same! You want to play a vampire? A cowboy? A Mech Pilot? Generica will let you!
Shit, I don’t care what you want to play. I just want to play.
So I have invested about 200 hours of my spare time building this website that is meant to help people and DM’s keep track of their characters only to discover that people won’t use it because it doesn’t support 3rd edition or 4th Edition character sheets. Because it doesn’t support Shadowrun characters, Boot Hill or Battle Tech… or whatever. Why am I wasting my time trying to support all these different characters when I could develop it specifically to support “Generica” and Generica only?
Because nobody plays Generica and nobody plays Generica because it’s not the D20 rule set (even though it could be).
I’m a big fan of open source software and I wonder if there is an open source role playing game? I’m going to check. Be back in bit.
More silly ideas my wife is going to divorce me over
I like to be inspired. I like to see where the crazy energy that is the original spark of an idea throws me and I absolutely love the roller-coaster ride that is the development cycle. Mostly, I think – no, I believe, that inspired people are inspiring and THAT – full stop – is why I want to be inspired. I want to be a part of that cycle. I want to be inspired by someone who is inpired so I can, in turn, inspire someone else.
I usually fail, run out of steam or get distracted by the next inspiring idea to be honest with you. Why? That’s a good question.
I can maintain an idea for only so long before the tedium of working the idea begins to weigh heavily and douse the original spark of energy that started the whole crazy process. Some people are starters and others are finishers. That leaves a whole majority of people acting as work horses somewhere in the middle.
That’s your day job isn’t it? If you think about it for a minute, the company you work for was started by someone who had that spark, that inspiration to start a business. They had the gumption to put up – not shut up – and make something happen.
They hired you, the peon, to do the grudging, boring, uninspired crap work didn’t they? If it was awesome to do what you do on a day to day basis, they would have taken care of that particular part of the job and hired someone else to do the rest of the crap. Am I wrong? Some of you will think I am and that’s excellent!
You see, you’ve been working some crap job for so long that you don’t even know or remember what it’s like to be inspired. This is your life. This is your day-to-day, run of the mill, bullshit existence and you’re comfortable with it.
YOU are COMFORTABLE with it.
COMFORTABLE KILLS INSPIRATION.
Do I need to continue?
Fantasy Weather
This post is entirely in reference to the post, “Timewasting” by my friend Alexis over on taodnd.com concerning weather patterns on fantasy worlds. Go catch up.
“If you’re inventing your own world, where do you start? What are the prevailing winds? Are you able to identify the principal zones of convection and subduction at the various latitudes of your world, to at least make an educated guess as to where said winds should originate?”
What’s the weather like on your fantasy world and why am I attempting to answer this question? To answer the second question first I am a D&D player these last few decades and I spent a good 4 years studying physical geography, including meteorology, in University. Meteorology is, unbeknown to many, a branch of the social “sciences” along with psychology and astrology and if you’re asking for my humble opinion – it absolutely belongs there as forecasting the weather is as much science as it is magic.
So, what’s the weather like in your magical realm of ? Aside from the fact that you can do whatever you want with a magical kingdom of your own imagination (it’s just a game, it’s magical, your players won’t give a rat’s ass anyway…) That didn’t work for me when I built my fantasy kingdom simply because as a geography major, I was chiefly concerned with how man interacts with their environment. The weather would be the big mathematical X everyone is trying to find in the real sciences. The weather affects everything. The weather is king. Which is why this has become a complete post and not a comment or addendum to the original post by Alexis.
The other obvious questions are, “who cares” and “why bother”. In answer to both I will admit that I am a nerd and created my own D&D world which includes a very detailed map with consistent weather patterns and very serious thought behind oh… the placement of mountains, earthquakes, and the like. “Why bother”, because that was my fetish in the 90’s – and frankly, I hadn’t discovered my other fetish as I had no game and couldn’t get laid.
Here is a primer of key points to consider when figuring out the weather of your fantasy world. I offer Wikipedia links not because they are a great source, but because they have free pictures and are a great resource for other links.
1. The Coriolis Effect
The Coriolis Effect
I’m willing to bet you’ve never heard of this and I hope you’ll understand that my explanation is limited because of time, not interest. Ever see that Simpsons episode where Bart calls Australia and asks which way the water spins? Unless your world is flat you will have to consider that it spins. If it spins then the Coriolis Effect will affect the oceans and the winds and that’s critical to understanding how the wind blows. The effect has some major consequences to weather.
The Coriolis Effect as it pertains to winds and oceans is most notable at the equator. Notice how the clockwise rotation of the Northern Hemisphere and the counter-clockwise rotation in the Souther Hemisphere meet and for the winds towards the West? This produces the “Horse Winds”, “Doldrums”, Trade Winds and Hurricanes.
They get the name Horse Winds because sailors stuck in them used to have to eat their horses to survive. I must admit that the Coriolis Effect isn’t the chief instigator of this weather pattern, but if you’re sailing out of Italy or England and down to South Africa you’re going to hit the Doldrums.
“The doldrums, usually located between 5° north and 5° south of the equator, are also known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ for short. The trade winds converge in the region of the ITCZ, producing convectional storms that produce some of the world’s heaviest precipitation regions”. – Trade Winds, Horse Latitudes, and the Doldrums [About.com]
Interesting how weather, history of sailing and a simple scientific principle can change your outlook on your fantasy world. As a side note, the grammatical differences between “effect” and “affect” have lost all meaning to me now.
2. Solar Radiation
Hadley Cell Cross Section
Like a microwave, solar radiation heats things up. Equatorial regions receive the most solar radiation and therefore the most heat. I hope that you already know what happens to hot air. (Hint: It expands and rises). This rising of the hot air produces absolutely crap winds for sailing (remember the Horse Winds earlier?) Combine this with that and you get murderous sailors.
Let’s look at the Earth from profile for a minute. At the equator the air is rising, the Coriolis Effect is bending it towards the poles and as the air moves towards the poles it begins to cool. As it cools it will begin to settle or “sink”. This is called a Hadley Cell. There are 3 such cells between the equator and the North Pole with 3 more as you approach the South Pole.
Because the air rises and moves to the poles, where do you think the new air comes from to replace the air that just left? That’s right, from the poles.
3. Oceanic Currents & Wind
Oceanic Currents
People never give the currents of the ocean enough credit for influencing the weather. It’s actually the currents that move the air more than any other effect out there and it’s the currents that create some of the most spectacular weather patterns such as my favorite, the Aleutian Low (the main drivers of Chinooks here in Southern Alberta, more commonly known as foehn winds) and El Niño. For the rest of North American readers consider the currents in the Caribbean or If you’re in India you’re very familiar with the Monsoon current in the Indian Ocean.
What I want you to notice, because this is important, is how the Coriolis Effect, Solar Radiation and the oceanic currents all seem to be moving in similar directions until you hit a huge land mass like the North America, Africa or Australia.
If you are at all familiar with how hurricanes track across the equator, towards the Caribbean and then North towards the U.S. consider the currents you see in the map to the right, solar radiation and the Coriolis Effect. Is it really any mystery any more?
Now imagine you’re Columbus and you’ve just set out for a 3 hour tour… He headed South towards Africa where he planned to make a hard… West. (Have you ever read about his first voyage and wondered how the man survived?) Horse meat, but I digress.
4. Mountains
adiabatic warming creates Chinooks.
If hot air rises, what happens if you raise air? More to the point, if a wind blows up against a mountain what happens? Remember my favorite weather pattern, the Aleutian Low? It blows very dense, very wet air up against the Rocky Mountains.
“Orographic lift occurs when an air mass is forced from a low elevation to a higher elevation as it moves over rising terrain. As the air mass gains altitude it expands and cools adiabatically, which can raise the relative humidity to 100% and create clouds and, under the right conditions, precipitation.” – Wikipedia
The Pacific North West and the Aleutian Low is an excellent example of this. High levels of precipitation on the West side of the Rockies, warm dry Chinook’s on the East side. There is actually a very neat current (notice how I didn’t say “cool”?) on the West side of New Zealand. Check the map above. Can you guess what kind of weather pattern is produced there? Can you guess what kind of forest exists on the West side of the island?
5. Pull it Together
Prevailing Winds
So what does this all mean for your fantasy world? How do you take this and create ecological diverse areas based on weather patterns? How do you determine what those weather patterns are?
I would suggest that you start at the equator of your world. Work up the Coriolis Effect (see diagram above). Work up the primary Hadley Cells (do a little more research and it’ll tell you where to draw them). Figure in the oceanic currents and then draw in the prevailing winds as a construct of the above. That’s when you take the mountains into consideration. Windward get’s the rain, leeward gets lovely weather from time to time during the winter months… or a raging hot desert depending on latitude.
If you really want to get into a bit further, go and check out jet streams, high pressure systems and low pressure systems, cold fronts and my favorite, occluded fronts.
Hope that gets you started on the right track because weather is a key component of the ecological environment. You don’t get Chinook’s blowing through rain forests in the high steppes.
Gifts from the Dungeon
I like to start my players with a grab bag full of cool stuff. Gifts from the fortunate life they’ve lived up until the point they enter my domain as the Dungeon Master. If the player wishes to play a decrepit, old, bumbling fool of a thief then consider that a gift. If the player wishes to play a well ranked member of court with a good family name backing them up, consider that a gift.
You want a +5 holy sword? Ok. What do I get?
You want a Staff of the Magi? Ok. What do I get?
What do I get that brings your character back to balance?
One less hand? Blind? Hideously ugly? An equally well equipped bounty hunter dogging you everywhere you go? A very high level member of court who holds a grudge against your “good” family name?
There are no random tables to check against. There are no rolls of the dice. You want it? Fine, but you better know, for every single copper piece, every elevation in status, every single advantage you seek that balance will be found and consequences shall run rampant at your choice. I’ll give you your benefit, your advantage, your bonus.
What I won’t give you is the balance – the con to your pro, the disadvantage to your advantage, the drawback to your benefit. They shall all remain hidden to you. They will blindside you. They will sneak up behind you and stab you in the back. They will pull the strings of your mortal enemies and by the time you figure it out it’ll be too late. Maybe.
That’s the game isn’t it? To take whatever advantage you think you have and use it to try and stay ahead of the game.
So now I offer you everything a thief could ask for. An unsuspecting city free of thieves. The best disguise you could ask for. An invisible safe house. A few extra levels of experience.
And you think I’m being too nice? That this will be a cake walk? That I haven’t planned this campaign from the start or thought about how I’ll tear apart your hirelings, plunder your safe house, reveal your disguise and turn the entire city against you?
Call them gifts… if you dare to. I’ll call them a head start, because you’ll need it.
Free Content is like Free Coffee
$90,000 / year in hosting fees.
$60,000 / year for 1 web applications developer.(and you’ll need 3 of them)
$45,000 / year for 1 designer (and you’ll need 2 of them)
$12,000 / year for a small office space.(and you’ll need a much bigger office with all that extra staff)
$3,000 / year for your office Internet connection(and you can easily quadruple that depending on where you live)
Still think you can make money with advertising on your website?
Imagine opening a coffee shop and giving the coffee away for free because you noticed some advertising in the bathroom of the other coffee shop down the road. You can easily determine that the advertisers must have paid some small sum to have their ad placed there.
What if the ads in the bathroom pay enough to cover your rent, utilities, staff salaries, disposables and other material costs. If the ad’s pay enough to make you $1000 per year profit then you just need to open 100 free coffee shops and you’ll make $100,000 a year profit.
Except you’ve forgotten to account for the extra overhead and staff that will be required to run a small empire of 100 coffee shops. I haven’t even tried to cover the cost of opening a new location, the cost of training new staff or the extra administrative staff and expenses. Your $100,000 / year barely covers one extra administrator and the rent on a small cubicle in a shared office space. How do you pay for the phone?
Oh sure, you might get a break on bulk purchases of your material costs, but that small 7% bulk margin is your only profit.
A small empire of 100 cafe’s might allow you to charge more for that advertising space. Another 10% in profit maybe?
What if you put advertising on more than just the bathroom walls? You could make more money right? What if you put advertising on the coffee cups? The front windows? Paint the parking stalls, the roof and the walls with advertising…. How much advertising and how aggressive can you get with your advertising before people start to take offense?
I can assure you that those ads you see in the bathroom won’t make you that kind of money. So why do so many people think that advertising on their websites will make them a small fortune? Why do they then pursue building a website with absolutely no business model other than Google Adsense?
There is a very strange correlation between advertising and respectability. This applies to the Internet as much as it does to a coffee shop.
If you have no advertising on your website you risk coming across as amateurish. If you have too much advertising you risk annoying your user base and loosing respectability. There is a fine line between too much and too little it would appear.(On a side note, can we agree to stop calling them users and start calling them customers or even clients?)
What if your cafe was literally covered wall to wall and ceiling to floor with paid advertising? Could you afford to give the coffee away for free?
How is content on a website any different from coffee in a cafe?
Who is it that keeps suggesting that Google Ads make good business sense?
Let’s look at this the other way around.
What does it take to make $100,000 / year by selling advertising on your website?
First, we need some numbers.
Ad CTR by Browser
Internet Explorer : 1.05%
Firefox : 0.66%
Safari : 0.50%
Google Chrome : 0.21%Ad CTR by Operating system
Windows : 0.92%
Mac : 0.52%
Linux : 0.46%Source: TechCrunch.com
CTR is the Click Through Rate. It measures how many of your visitors actually click on one of your advertisements. If you’re not in the know, you get paid per click. Less that 1% of visitors will click on your ad. To keep the math easy I’ll use 1% anyway, but keep in mind that it’s much less than that.
The actual price per click that Google pays isn’t a science, it’s more of a black art as the rate changes and fluctuates depending on a variety of variables and how much the advertisers are willing to pay.
So…
$100,000 per year is the goal. ($8,333.33 / mo.)
1% click through rate.
If you earn $0.10 per click, you need 1,000,000 clicks in a year.
100,000,000 visitors in a year will earn you 1,000,000 clicks (with an average 1% CTR).
100,000,000 visitors in a year is 8,333,333 visitors per month.
8,333,333 visitors per month are going to hit your front page. That will cost you.
The landing (index) page for Google.com is 58 KB.
58 KB times 8,333,333 visitors per month = 483,333,314 KB (460.94 GB)
let’s calculate how much this service will cost using the Amazon Web Services Calculator. I’ll assume 8 linux installations running 100% capacity for that many visitors per month with a high CPU load for a web application. 2 database servers with an 80% utilization rate and 2 load balancing, and deveopment servers with 75% load. I’m going to keep this hosting in the US only (No European hosting).
$7506.54 / mo. * 12 months
= $90,078.48 / year cost of hosting
$90,000 / year in hosting fees.
$60,000 / year for 1 web applications developer.(and you’ll need 3 of them)
$45,000 / year for 1 designer (and you’ll need 2 of them)
$12,000 / year for a small office space.(and you’ll need a much bigger office with all that extra staff)
$3,000 / year for your office Internet connection(and you can easily quadruple that depending on where you live)
Still think you can make money with advertising on your website?
Mootools Sortable Table
One might need to sort a table because one already HAS a table. I can appreciate that Mootools gives you the ability to take a data object and convert it to a sortable table (ie. XML or JSON), and if I ever find myself in that situation I’ll be thrilled, but what about pre-existing tables? How do you sort those?
A number of people are looking to add some sort-ability to a table without having to make another page request to regenerate the table data. I’m talking about a way to avoid multiple SQL queries and factory classes written in the PHP just to handle sorting of a small table. Larger tables simply increase the size of page requests and SQL load which, to my way of thinking, drive the front end developer to seek out table sorting in JavaScript or harass the back end developer to write handlers. Well… what’s a poor member of the Moo Hurd too do?
The Mootools sortable tables class requires headers and rows to be referenced as an array (headers) and as a nested array (rows[cells]). It’s not difficult to target and tear down an existing table to generate this information, how else is the sorting class supposed to know what’s in the cells and which cells are supposed to trigger click event?
If you have a data object, you can’t tell which or what from this or that can you? I’m almost willing to bet that the data object doesn’t have anything remotely close to header information in it. Why would it? So the Mootools table sorting class requires you to specify that explicitly. Makes sense.
But what about those cases where you have a properly formatted table with all the lovely table headers explicitly and exquisitely written? Like so…
Example table layout
<table id="character_menu_table"> <thead><th>id</th><th>name</th><th>XP</th><th>Level</th></thead> <tbody> <tr><td>1</td>Monster Joe<td></td>763594<td></td><td>7</td></tr> <tr><td>2</td>Touchdown Jones<td></td>213432<td></td><td>10</td></tr> <tr><td>3</td>Red Suit Riley<td></td>110<td></td><td>1</td></tr> </tbody> </table>
Why can’t we make the assumption that the header row contains the cells we want to use as our sortable trigger events? We can crawl the rows and cells of the remainder of the table and end up with
Mootools Sortable Tables for Existing Tables
var originalTable = $('character_menu_table'); // target the existing table by ID
// generating the headers from the existing table
var myheaders = new Array();
originalTable.getElements('th').each(function(el,n){
myheaders[n] = el.innerHTML;
});
//generating the rows based on the existing table
var myrows = new Array();
originalTable.getElements('tr').each(function(el,n){
myrows[n] = new Array();
el.getElements('td').each(function(nel,i){
myrows[n][i] = nel.innerHTML;
});
});
// setting up the properties of the Mootools sortable table
var myctable = new HtmlTable('new_table',{
properties: {
border: 0,
cellspacing: 0,
cellpadding: 0
},
headers: myheaders,
rows: myrows,
sortable:true,
zebra:true,
classZebra: 'altRowStyle'
});
var originalID = originalTable.getAttribute('id'); // capture the original ID before we destroy it
myctable.inject(originalTable.getParent()); // inject the new sortable table into the parent element of the original table
originalTable.destroy(); // destroy the original table immediately.
$(myctable).setAttribute('id',originalID); // set the ID of the new table to match the ID of the old table so we don't have to change our CSS.
The above works in FireFox 3.5. I don’t support I.E of any version or in principle – so your mileage may vary.
My Tools@Work
Integrated Development Environments
In the last interview I had one of the questions they asked was about IDE’s . They’re basically text editors on steroids. Automatic code completion, syntax highlighting, file management, SVN or CVS plugins, etc… The full shebang.
When I was learning how to code in C, (many moons ago) I took some advice about IDE’s and especially about code snippets. A teacher once advised me to avoid IDE’s and snippets at all costs. To write my code by hand, no syntax highlighting, no integration with other libraries, and absolutely no shortcuts with snippets.
To write everything and to write it all from scratch using Notepad would give me a greater appreciation for the code, from all aspects, and most importantly it would give me the ability to really learn the syntax. I wasn’t so sure I liked that idea at the time, but I gave it a shot for a summer and I think he was right. I really learned my syntax, but I didn’t produce a lot of usable functions or programs for that matter. Development was slow.
IDE’s are developed to help you write usable code in a more efficient way. There are several available. IBM has a great article that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of 7 IDE’s. I’ve used Eclipse, NetBeans and several others. All of them give me the same two headaches.
1. They never seem to stay stable long enough and I end up spending too much time updating, patching, configuring and reconfiguring them to accept changes in the development environment.
2. They never seem to handle SSH or SAMBA shares the way some of the other tools I use can.
The entire question of IDE’s is a pros and cons list. Stack them up for what you like and scratch them off for what you don’t. The choice of an IDE is a pretty personal decision IMHO.If the goal is to write usable code in an efficient way I think that the developer knows what works for them and what doesn’t. Let me derail and provide an example.
I use a $19 keyboard from Logitech at home. I tried to use a $120, multimedia, super-cool backlit monster of a keyboard. Everytime I came home from work I had to learn how to type all over again. It wasted time and it wasted my energy. By Monday morning I would have to learn how to type on the work keyboard all over again. It wasted time. So now I use the same $19 keyboard at home and at work.
I think IDE’s are the same as keyboards. Every developer has their own tool set that they like to use, are comfortable with and feel they work with efficiently.
So what do I use?
Operating System
I prefer the Linux operating system. Is that a big surprise? I won’t get all linux-is-a-cult, command line bashing, the-best-distro is… evangelical on you. That’s not my style. I do, however, think that the point of an IDE – if it is a question of efficiency and preference – can best be answered by comparing the production, development and workspace in how they communicate with one another.
Because the majority of the work I do, both in a development sense and in an end production server are run on a Linux system; I think that the communication between the three shouldn’t be an issue. I feel that Linux communicates with Linux very well. They communicate “right out of the box” as it were and setting up a file manager in Linux to communicate with an SSH server on a production or development box is incredibly easy and, more importantly, it’s stable.
The ease and stability that a Linux workstation can communicate with another Linux development server creates an easy and efficient way to integrate my workstation with a remote web server. I can create these remote connections on the fly, save them, bookmark them and move on to the next important point.
These connections or methods of communication and file sharing allow me to work with my entire tool set as if the files I’m working on were local files. I understand that this can be done with Windows and Mac, but in the last 2 years I’ve never had an issue. I could compare that to the Windows users in the office, but that would turn into a flame war. My point here is that these file shares can be setup quickly, securely and efficiently across all applications in a manner that remains stable. Many of the single solution IDE’s I’ve used in the past can’t do this at all or they do it poorly.
Writing Code
While a number of the IDE’s are available for the Linux Operating System I haven’t been able to find one that runs as fast or carries as little overhead as the Gnome Editor or GEdit. Overhead is of critical importance to me, and maybe this is where preference gets the best of me and so I will remain open to options. I’ll explain why in the next section, but let me continue with my editor of choice.
A vast majority of anything an IDE can do, ie. syntax highlighting, project and file management, file history, immediate undo, queuing, caching, etc.. can be done with a nicely configured GEdit. I showed this setup to a Zend fan a while back and he laughed. 80% of his daily use in Zend was handled by Gedit but doesn’t cost $400/year. Oh sure, Zend Studio has some interesting features and integrates with Zend Debugger (a pretty awesome package), but as we inevitably discovered – “debugging ain’t testing”.
Cross Browser Compatibility Testing
Identifying and being able to test, test, test across a number of different browsers and operating systems is critical to front end web development. This is one of the areas that Linux as a workspace really shines and why I try to keep my process overhead down. I don’t expect my work environment to provide a 64-bit quad-core with 8GB of RAM like I have at home (remember the $20 keyboard scenario?)
Linux allows me to install virtual instances of several operating systems and run them all concurrently in full screen or embeded modes. What this means, if you haven’t experienced this for yourself already, is that I can run Firefox 3.5 on Linux, I.E 6 on Windows XP, I.E 7 on Vista and I.E 8 on Windows 7 ~ all at the same time ~ on the same desktop while working in Gedit and solving cross browser compatibility issues within the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. I haven’t seen anyone pull that one off in Windows… yet. I’m also waiting with baited breath to see how the OS X virtualization experiment comes along so I can test Safari and Opera on Snow Leopard. I’m told it can be done, but it’s in beta (January, 2010).
Image Manipulation
I like Photoshop, I do… I used it for 4 years and when I jumped to the Linux Operating System I sure did miss it. What I’ve discovered over the last 8 years is that 80% of my daily work in Photoshop can now be done with Gimp. The other 20% can be done faster with other tools anyway.
Maybe I’m a little jaded, or I’ve been around the block one too many times, but Adobe still produces the worst markup I’ve ever seen, it can’t scale a .PNG very well, copy function degrades the dimensions and accuracy past 24 pastes, and it produces .GIF like it’s still 1999 (maybe that’s a good thing . For .JPG Photoshop is a dream because it has the actual JPEG library. Gimp uses it’s own open source version of JPG and does a good job, but it’s no Photoshop in that department.
The Gimp imports and exports Photoshop files (and a load of other formats), can create animations, scale images in 10 different ways, and I can write my own scripts and plugins or extend it using the work others have contributed to the open source community.I use both and can confidently say I can do more in Gimp and get it done faster than I could with Photoshop.
Conflict Resolution
Universities and trade schools don’t teach you how to pitch your ideas and they certainly don’t teach conflict resolution. Art schools, like ACAD, require all of their students to take a business and communications class. Technical schools that teach graphic design really fail their students on this subject and I think that’s a flaw in their programming (pardon the pun).
One of the interviews I did 2 years ago asked me about my abilities to negotiate, resolve conflicts and work with a team. I think they were quite surprised to discover that I did a lot of team building, leadership training, conflict resolution and sales programs as part of my career as a camp counselor, ball hockey coach and as a sales representative. A lot of which had to be thrown out of the window in my IT career.
I’ve discovered that it’s easier to work with 120 “behaviourly disturbed” campers referred by the City Police and Social Services than it is to work with 4 graphic designers, 1 CEO and 2 lead developers – all but one of whom have absolutely no tools to express their ideas let alone adequately debate them. You see, it’s not about behaviour in this setting, it’s about passion and preferences – it’s about the blood, sweat and art. You can’t negotiate preferences for a graphic or a color choice like you negotiate for a used car. You can’t do team building with co-workers in IT like you do in sales or on a ball hockey court. It’s a completely different environment with completely different goals.
That said, I was once told that conflict resolution is 80% mitigation and 20% explanation. Conflict resolution skills are best when they’re not used. The old Kung Fu principle of, “training so you don’t have to fight” applies to much more than martial arts. Let me give you two examples.
For example; constructive criticism, when done well, can help avoid the necessity for conflict resolution. If you can explain why you don’t like something specific about an idea you can work out the bugs in the idea without insulting the person presenting the idea. It is preferable to work the idea in parts than the idea as a whole. Ever notice how some people can say they don’t like the idea and have it come across like they hate the person pitching the idea? People are not ideas, but people do connect on a very internal level to their ideas and develop a sense of ownership for their ideas. Attacking the idea as a whole is just about as productive as attacking the person who is sharing the idea.
Another example relates to something I call the Trinity of Controversy. The “Trinity” contains three topics of conversation that can never lead to a productive or positive social interaction. The Trinity consists of the following three topics, relationships (or sex), politics and religion (or culture). I do my best to avoid these topics and have developed several fun diversions to get around them. Closely related to the Trinity are music, movies and art. The reason these topics never fly in a workplace is because many people feel very passionately about them. If you happen to disagree with their position on any of the three you don’t just risk insulting them, you absolutely will insult them.
Brainstorming & Group Meetings
While a lot of my previous training has flown out the window, there are still core fundamentals of all of that training which still apply. Chiefly is the ability to listen. Sometimes asking short, to the point questions can help someone develop their proposal or idea into something more focused. Sometimes you need to go the other way and ask specific questions that lead the designer or developer to explain how their idea can fit into the bigger picture. Nothing means more to creative people than being listened to and coming away from something feeling like you understand their idea can really contribute to a positive working environment. It doesn’t matter so much if you accept their idea, or a portion of their idea, so long as you understand their idea. I apply this inside and outside of meetings. Listening is critical to building relationships.
One of the reason I’ve worked hard to throw out some of the training, specifically the sales training, is that I can be quite persuasive and even charming – much to the chagrin of some of my coworkers. While those skills were applauded and rewarded in sales, a creative brainstorming session is no time for solution sales or especially the hard sell.
Sales did, however, teach me one very important skill about handling meetings and that’s the “take away”. What do you want to “take away” or get out of this meeting? Understanding the goals of the meeting before it begins can help to keep things on track. In a creative brainstorming session the take aways can be referred to when things get derailed. Knowing when things are derailed is a hot topic, but know when you, yourself are derailing the conversation is a very rare skill.
(No) Worries
I love programming and I don’t mind sales (my previous career), but there has to be something better than this instability as a programmer for a dot-com startup.You see, it’s been pretty touch and go with the job for the last couple of months and as of today, it’s all go. As in – “go find a new job” – kind of go.
The new startup company has some big advantages. They’re small, they’re more casual, they’re generally interested in achieving a goal and that goal is pretty well defined. They may not know how they’re going to pay the rent or the Internet bill and the coffee is usually pretty bad, but the people are unified (even if they might be arguing about a small detail) and they’re excited. You don’t generally get “excited” in larger, well established and entrenched companies.
The larger more established companies don’t give out the, “Good news! Everyone can go home early today! Bad news, our funding just got cut so don’t bother coming in on Monday”, speech either.
So the startup went down. It was a chance I took and it was great while it lasted. No worries. Except what to do now and what can I learn from this experience?
On the other side of the career scale there aren’t a lot of sales positions that would allow me to sell products I believe in. One would think that software sales would be a good career move for me, but software “ain’t” websites and websites don’t hire sales people – do they? None in my neck of the woods it seems.
So here I am, job hunting or client hunting again. It didn’t seem like such a big deal the last time. Working freelance on side jobs is one thing, but getting paid to run through the hoops of courting a client with no available income starts to sound a tad pressured. It would be easy to fall into the slip and get caught up in a no-end, no-business, no-pay scam. The likes of which do exist out there if you’re a freelancer.
Maybe I’ll go manage a video store. It’s a regular paycheck, the customers are better than other retail environments and the staff always have something in common – they all love movies. I’m sure video stores have a future… right?
Billable Hours
My boss did a nice thing and posted this ad on kijiji to try and get me some billable hours. Until it pays off or I find a new job, I can enjoy the warm fuzzy from it.
“We are a tech startup in Calgary (working out of a cool space in Inglewood), and have hit a funding bump in the road. Funding is coming, but we are not able to keep all the critical members of the team together unless we can find them an contract engagement for a few months.
I have 1 excellent PHP developer that I do not want to lose – so I am willing to contract him out for less than my cost (effectively subsidizing his engagement with you). He is an excellent value, and will be able to work at his salaried wage on an hourly basis for you. He would normally bill out at $125/hr, but all I need is $30/hr to make sure he can stay with the team.
If you have a project that needs some extra PHP horsepower (+ advanced Javascript, MySQL and good networking ability), and want to pay a contractor a fraction of the normal rate – then call me and we can talk. He can work in your office, or ours. The only deal is that he get paid reliably for what will surely be excellent work.”