How to be an Effective Programmer – Organization

In my mind, what makes the best kind of programmer is their ability to organize.

I say this because when you simplify web programming in general, it basically comes down to solving problems. Taking a complicated (or what appears to be complicated) scenario and simplifying it into smaller pieces that you can understand. In my opinion, organization ends up becoming the most important aspect of web programming….even more important the being an uber programmer. Continue reading

The Pitfalls of PHP – PHP and Messy Code

I really like PHP. I like how it is not overly complex, and how it provides freedom in how to put together websites.

However, what has been growing on me over the last few years is what I don’t like about this freedom. Giving other programmers the freedom to write very sloppy code. An example of this is object oriented programming. If this is utilized correctly in PHP, it is meant to make maintenance and updates a lot easier. It also is meant to save time by giving you access to code that has already been written for the system. However, if you get a PHP programmer writing OOP, but they don’t really understand how to use it….you sometimes end up with what I like to call “nightmare code”. Simple tasks or bugs end up taking hours and sometimes days to figure out, because you can’t figure out what the original programmer was trying to do. Continue reading

MontanaProgrammer – Up and Running!

This weekend I got the site up and running. The design is not finalized quite yet, and I need to still add some content before it will be ready to go.

If things go well, it will be ready to go by this weekend. I want to at least get 2-3 posts into the system before I submit it to search engines.