I recently needed to make some changes to the Kosibah wedding dress site. We wanted to add some Pinterest (in other words, make it easy for people to post the images to Pinterest). And I’d also received some ideas about how to tidy things up in the navigation area so that it wasn’t so distracting.
Unfortunately, my PC crashed back in January. Most of the stuff I’d re-installed but my development environment needed recreating. Fortunately I don’t have to install MySQL, PHP and Apache very often but it does mean that I’d forgotten all the tweaks and twiddles that you have to do to get it running. I started by trying to install the three applications separately following various bits of advice you can find on the internet. It worked – for a while. Then on reboot it wouldn’t.
I began to despair. I confess that I thought an integrated package like XAMPP was cheating – just for amateurs. But I wasn’t here to hone my installation skills; I wanted to get on with installing the software so I could make some updates to the site. The software worked like a charm. In fact, in the interest of recording why my earlier efforts failed, I remembered that one of the things that WAMP (Apache, PHP, mySQL for Windows) doesn’t seem to like is installation into a directory that has spaces. XAMPP puts it into an c:\xampp\ folder. That was the trick I’d forgotten since the last time I installed the software. Definitely avoid the Programs Files (x86) folder for your Apache installation. I don’t know why but these three programs don’t work too well if you install into a folder with a space or “funny” character in its name. Most of the site is written in jQuery and PHP and I use phpDesigner since I can’t get used to using eclipse or other java-based software – it feels too much like typing through treacle. phpDesigner is a Windows app and is much snappier to use.
And I was off.
Of course, most of these tools are free (phpDesigner being the exception). And the advice on the internet about how to get them installed is also free. In fact, most of the tools are open source so not only are they free, they’re also freely maintained. Indeed strangers had come to my aid in many ways.
So why should the internet and programming tools be so full of random acts of kindness? Why should these people contribute their time and effort for no immediate or obvious reward? I think it has to do with the inherent creativity in the craft of programming.
Nobody asks a poet whether he’s making money from his art. And the starving artist in his garret is celebrated in opera, literature, painting. So why the big deal if some creative programmers want to contribute code to the world and not expect an immediate monetary reward. Again, I think this is to do with the creative impulse.
A lot of people think that programmers are nerdy, geeky and have no social skills. I suppose they are; rather like a lot of composers, painters and authors. People sometimes think that programming is too constrained to be creative. But you don’t hear the same people complaining that a Mozart symphony is not creative because it follows symphonic form. Or that paintings that adopt structural techniques such as repoussoir or the rule of thirds are lacking in imagination. But the same criticism gets levelled at computer programmers. And I think unfairly. Computer programming is, after all, simply a way of expressing a solution to a problem in code. Art (in its broadest sense) is solving the problem of expression in painting, literature or music. I don’t think the two are so very different. Fish gotta swim, writers gotta write, coders gotta code.
Danny's adventures in Agile 