Dan Hilton

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who know where you live” Damian Conway

• Use spaces not tabs.
• Code goes no further than column 77.
• no-one ever died from too much whitespace.
• Separate operators and braces.
• Indent by four spaces.
• Line up assignments.
• Space keywords not functions.
• vertical rhythm.
• k & R bracketing
• one statement per line
• break lines before operators (except in JS)
• Use single quotes where posssible.
• Always use /x on regexps (removes all whitespace)
• Hungarian code is harmful.
• Short variable names harmful
• Use underscores not camel case.

ORG - Sesisson one

MP’s need people to talk to.

electronic voting - It’s a bad idea, is it?

Observed e-voting at the last election, v. v. bad.

Lot’s of errors, xss errors in interface, sloppy webservers.

DRM laws passed to ensure that anything with DRM has to say it on he outside.

Internet regulation of YouTube going before commons select commitee. Bad idea to regulate what you can and can’t upload.

ID cards - card not the really bad thing, the database behind it is.

Good talk, I think I’ll try and join the ORG as it fights for lots of things I agree with.

Tags: Barcamplondon3, BarcampLondon, Barcamp

Is the web boring? A silly title perhaps for a web developer Blog but I’m starting to lose the love. Less and less is really making me go wow - perhaps that’s just a sign of getting older and more experience or just perhaps people have stopped doing things for the love and more the money. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does show in the quality of the web app / site. I’ve been thinking a lot about web apps and start-ups recently, business models, revenue streams and such like - looking at various uk and and American start-ups thinking: “Just how did that get funded?” - like an online app for making cartoons or drawing speech bubbles on pictures. How is that going to make money? A premium service were you can host them on their site rather than jsut moving them to the latest free photo hosting service?

I used to read blogs about interesting new sites and cool new ways delivering web experiences - but now those bloggers talk about ranking lists, how Facebook is the new messiah and how many rss subscribers they have. Maybe I’m just reading the wrong blogs, maybe I’m just experiencing the post holiday come-down, I dunno. But I used to be very optimistic about the web and it’s ability to deliver us from some evil or at least drudgery. Now it seems more important to send pictures of cats with comments on them rather than thinking about we can push things forward. In a random clothes shop in Malaga, Spain there was a point of sale sign which simply stated: “The chance of change”, I’m not sure that they meant to evoke anything in particular but it stuck with me. In the internet and the opportunities it affords us for information flow, we have a chance to change. We may lose that chance as slowly it gets comodified and resold as measured, tracked attention stream coupled with the loosely accurate social graph of our online footprint, past, present and future. Or I may be getting old.

Anyway, enough ranting for now - the usual what I think is upcoming and cool:

• Erlang - parallel programming made easier in a functional language, for hardcore web app infrastructure - helped twitter scale and runs a lot of jabber servers.
• Symfony - been working with this now for a while - starting to like it’s bolt togetherness and the structure it brings to projects.
• Jack Pente - http://jackpenate.com/ - saw him live at the Anson rooms at Bristol Union, awesome energy, crazy stage presence and a really good set list. He also twitter’s in a useful way to his site - I’m not sure if that’s done for him or if it comes from him.

I’m going to be blogging about Ming as well, it’s just that if I do it now I’ll get this blog stuck in most swear filters!