To all the 2old2play members and users out there, I’m sorry. I have been working on the site maintenance all weekend and still have a TON of stuff that needs to be worked out. The database is just SOOOO much bigger then I thought and going line by line seems to be my only real option for not screwing things up entirely on the site. What I’m basically having to do is go through each “section” of the site and optimize the code before moving onto the next. When you think about the shear number of “sections” (i.e. forums, blogs, clan forums, gallery, tournaments, news, comments, shop, and on and on and on and on) you can understand why this is such a huge deal.

I basically have decided that NO MATTER WHAT I will put 2old2play online by Monday as promised. The only issue is that there may and will be a ton of stuff that wont be done. So if you notice things broken or out of place DO NOT email or PM me since I’m %100 sure I already know about it. I just don’t want to be down any longer then we already are. So sit back and try to relax for one more day as I stumble through a bit more code until we can open back on Monday ready or not…

P.S. In case the blog doesn’t say, its 3am here so if I sound crazy or spell like a 2 year old it’s because I need sleep and have been working all day and night. So I apologize in advance.

What is the best sign of a great development job? When nobody knows you were there. Yes, development can be a thankless job which requires hours of toil, bugs and head pounding stress. In the end, nobody even realizes you did it!

All that work and we’re rewarded by what? Simply put, money and pride. Yes, I put money first because it is typically required for survival. Sure, it’s the root of all evil but it also puts food on the table for our families and allows us to pay monthly bills. Pride is our next big plus, if you don’t have pride in your work you’ll become “just another coder.”

Pride drives you to success, allows you to grow as a developer and feel good about the job you do when nobody else notices. If people notice your job it will typically come in the form of a site outage or “unexpected” errors. Nobody wants their customers to click “add to cart” and be rewarded with a fatal PHP error - that’s a loss of a customer.

Nobody wants to utilize a specially design module, that you hand crafted, to be rewarded with a blank white screen or apache server crash. If you design stable, reusable code nobody will notice you were there.

Expect one person (or group), besides yourself, to notice your work where all others fail to see the beauty: the ones that paid you to do the work. A cost considered “well spent” by a firm is the one where nobody fears of failure or instability. This will lead to great references and more jobs in the future, which in turn means more money for you.

Consider this: your development efforts are not unlike a Porsche, leave the designer to build a beautiful body and presentation, you take the time to build a beautiful engine and suspension.

A beautiful body design gets the customer in the door but the cost justification and reputation of a sweet sports car is all about what’s under the hood.

The topic of developing great code can be long and boring. So, for the readers I’ll make this humorous and shorter, list style, because everyone loves lists!

#1. Commenting Code or “Fifteen Pieces of Flare Is The Bare Minimum”

You’re happily coding along, php, c++ or otherwise (hey, even Javascript) and it hits you! The most awesome line of code in the world, it does all you ever desired and more with only a single line of code chained with some funky “if” statement and a regular expression. You want to show it to your friends but you know they won’t care or understand what you’re talking about.

What do you do? You sit back, proud of your creation, test it and move on thinking “wow, I just leveled up my coding stats.” WRONG. You did the exact opposite, you actually got more dumb. Why? Because six months from now you may find a bug or want to add some new code features and you’ll come upon that utterly creative line of code and think to yourself “hmm, what does this do?”

You have no idea. You know it was cool at the time, but you’re lost on its actual purpose. Why? Because you left out the damn comments and you now have to re-trace your steps to guess what it is supposed to do. Second guessing yourself, you find a “bug” in the line… you thought you were a creative bastard but you really screwed up something bad; something you hadn’t considered before.

You re-write it and feel good about it, and move on. Lo-and-behold all your code breaks down and things just don’t work the same (or at all) anymore. No PHP errors or linker errors, but things just aren’t working right. Why?

Because that line of code wasn’t broken at all, you had a very specific reason for doing it and you lost it all when you decided to retool that line of code. Now, imagine how that would have played out had you left a little comment block explaining your reasoning for it’s creation. Imagine how much time you would have saved having to go re-generate that genious six months later.

Comment your code, for both yourself and others. Don’t do the bare minimum and comment a function header or script header - comments are there to help recall historical actions and explain to yourself and others why you did something. Go above and beyond the minimum.

(more…)

When working on a large project that scales many files, requires database interaction and requires milestone feature development it’s always good to have modules to make life easier. What exactly do I mean by a “module”? In C programming we would refer to it as a library but in web development we may simply call it a “module” - a bundle of cool functionality that stands on it’s own.

Stand-alone modules typically do have one dependency: a content management system or CMS. Many content management systems live and die by the ability to write your own plug-in modules. For instance, in the Drupal CMS we utilize modules for all forms of development, from custom additions to downloadable add-ons so we don’t go re-inventing the wheel.

(more…)

Don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing. We finally are just getting around to patching up and tuning up the oldest of our company armada, 2old2play.com. If you’re visiting from the site, don’t worry! I just started the process and I’m hoping I will be able to finish up around Sunday morning and have everything back online and running. I know it seems like a really long time, but behind the scenes of 2old2play there is a quagmire of old files, never launched features, and stuff that we have no idea about why it’s there or how it functions. That just tends to happen when your running a site for this long and work on it when you have the free time. You lose track of things and now we need to track all those “things” down. For now, check out GameStooge or spend you day in chat, but whatever you do don’t actually work!