Asymptomatic

Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.

The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.

The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.

So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more

I've had the occasion over the past few years in my capacity as a long-time developer to interview candidates for jobs within my company and for clients I've contracted for. As a result, I've had some time to formulate some opinions about what questions to ask developers who are applying for a position, and the types of answers to expect from a candidate that you'd want to hire.

Sadly, I think the market of good developers is far, far too small. I do subscribe to the philosophy that great developers are born, not made, although I also believe that you can produce adequate developers with good training and persistent oversight. It is really unfortunate that coders who want to get jobs aren't as versed in what makes a great developer great, and it's a frequent topic of discussion when hiring rounds begin.

I'd like to share a few of the qualities I like to look for in a web developer to both educate would-be coders as to what I expect, and educate would-be interviewers who wouldn't know a good developer if he hacked into his bank account and stole all his cash. ...

One of the more common design patterns in installable web applications today is the Front Controller pattern. Unlike other web applications that have separate files to respond to specific requests, the front controller pattern funnels all requests through a single file, and that file processes the requested URL to respond as appropriate.

In typical scenarios, you'll accomplish this with Apache using a set of mod_rewrite directives. These directives first check to see if the requested file or directory exists. If it does not exist, then the request is passed on to the front controller. This allows requests for existing files - like images, stylesheets, and client-side scripts - to be requested directly rather than passing through the URL rewriting mechanism.

If you are familiar with implementing a front controller using Apache, you will recognize these directives, which are commonly found in an .htaccess file within the application directory:...

"Ah, Owen, you don't work hard enough," I keep hearing you all say. "You're such the slacker! Why don't you do something useful instead of writing all of that blog software?"

Well, between work and Habari, I do like to hang out with the family, and when I'm not doing that (usually after everyone had gone to bed, and long after I should have gone to bed myself) I'm frequently working on stupid little side projects that aren't of any consequence to anyone. My most recent such "mini" pet project is Pastoid.

Pastoid is a weird little thing that I started out of frustration at the lack of fusion between various pastebin services that are available and the tinyurl services that are abundant these days. I use the word "fusion" because I like it better than "mashup", which sounds more like something my kids do with potatoes, and not some whiz-bang web 2.0 technology. Also, it's one of the best lines of my favorite Invader Zim episode. Besides that, I'll tell you what it does....

The people at the Habari Project have recently released version 0.4 of Habari. If you don't usually read my blog, then you might not know that I help write this software and that the software is what runs this site.

Following up on the 0.4 release, I wrote a kind of "manifesto" for what we need to accomplish for Habari 0.5, and then I read the whole thing into the computer so that you could just listen to it. Lucky you, fun for me. Enjoy.

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