The Social Geek

At my new workplace, we have decided to use phpDocumentor for all our future development. After spending a month at HireLabs, and working on existing systems and code, I thought we needed a much cleaner documentation system that would help ease the new developers on the team.

There are various products of HireLabs both commercial and in-house. I was asked to work on the in-house tool called Pigeon, a customer relationship management system that HireLabs uses to communicate with current and potential customers. Unlike other HireLabs products, the Pigeon code was written in quite a messy way I should say, and it was a bit interesting to work with that code. The code was unstructured in many places and was not really documented. As a result i ended up spending a little more time looking at what some of the methods actually did, and hence lost some on productivity end point ;(

I was fine with the procedure but I thought it would be nice if we can some how make it easy for anyone like me who comes into this company as a new hire. I showed my project manager and the rest of the team what phpDocumentor can do and how it does it, and everyone liked it. So we’ve decided to use it!

Our project manager Ovais is a BIG Google fan (who isn’t). He keeps learning about how Google works within. One of the things that we have applied at HireLabs from Google is the peer-review process. Every Monday, we have a team meeting and each of the team member presents what he/she did last week and what he/she intends to do the following week. Any code written in the previous week will be reviewed and will be judged by other team members in terms of quality. If the code lacks anything, an improvement is suggested and the member who wrote the original code will fix it.

One good thing that happened is that from now on, it will be essential for every team member who codes to make sure his code is well commented and documented as per the phpDocumentor standards – which are nice and simple IMHO and deliver powerful documentation in return. Failing to document the code would result in immediate rejection from the peer-review process

So, we’ve started using phpDocumentor! have you?

I made a flash based game a few days back for my elective course (2D Animation) and it actually came out quite nice. Below is the screen shot of the game in progress and a link to download the zip file containing the game.

The Yellow Car belongs to us

Download Game Here (1.83 MB zip file)

Hope you like it!

The following paragraph is a book excerpt taken from the really cool C++ in Action by Bartosz Milewski and I think I like what he says

“There is a popular unflattering stereotype of a programmer as a socially challenged nerd. Somebody who would work alone at night, subsist on Twinkies, avoid direct eye contact and care very little about personal hygiene. I’ve known programmers like that, and I’m sure there are still some around. However most of the specimens of this old culture are becoming extinct, and for a good reason. Progress in hardware and software makes it impossible to produce any reasonably useful and reliable program while working in isolation. Teamwork is the essential part of software development.”

I have to say, Milewski’s book is one of the rare few books that are actually free from any marketing deep shit and feels very much like a friendly and common sense conversation between the author and the reader. Most books go through extensive editing I believe (to try and make it more sellable and pricey, which is rhetorical), but this one’s not and I love it for that reason! Go read it and have a good doze of fun and knowledge!

I was recommended this site by a friend, and I was quite pleased to see it. I haven’t gone through the case of actually getting a house through zemeen.com yet, but the results look interesting on their site. I think this can be a good time saving portal for people before reaching out to an agent or looking yourself directly.

Hey fellaz! Long time! I’m long done with my exams, and I’m all into my new job, working for HireLabs as Software Development Engineer. Do checkout the site, I think their products are promising, but again, you never know nothing of startups but the team is excellent – that I am sure of! Will get back with more maybe, in the meantime, ciao!

I don’t feel like blogging these days. I’ve already been slow in posing things lately (darn slow ) and I feel I’d like to take a break and come back after my final exams in May =) happy life fellaz!

I’ve been awarded the Lemonade Blog Award by the Dinky Mind =) Here is what it looks like

so The Rules:

1. Thank the person who was so thoughtful for giving you this award by linking their blog to this post.
Thanks to the Dinky Mind for awarding me the next best thing since Oscars!

2. Put the logo on your blog or post.
Done!

3. Nominate 10 blogs which show great attitude/gratitude.
Grrrrr I’ll do only 5! can’t think/find much =)

4. Link your nominees to your post.
Okies

5. Comment them to tell them about the award they’ve won.
Will do

And I nominate:

• Dinky Mind (apna award wapas lo! )
• Dash of Spice
• H212
• YouTee
• Abnormal Geek

Woah, done! hehe! I have another tag to respond to, again by the mac-maniac Dinky Mind! Will try and do that asap! =)

Eram, who is one of my good friends posted this on facebook and I liked it, so sharing here =)

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

by Atisha

Hey fellaz! I noticed that I’ve been away from Blog since a looooooooong time now and I thought I have to post something. I got an email telling me that Umem aka the Dinky Mind has tagged me – which is so nice of her. I’m actually up to quite a bit these days so I get little motivation for blogging for some reason. But well, I’ll definitely come up with some posts in a day or so – the one for the picnic trip to Hawks Bay and one for Dinky Mind’s tag! =)

I was installing xdebug in Linux and I had PHP setup nicely with pear. While onto it I got this error that you see in my post’s title. So I figured after a little research that php5-dev is needed (which is the devel package for php5) to go forward with my journey of installing xdebug.

So, I did this in my console:

sudo aptitude install php5-dev

of course, you need to change the above to your particular version of php. The php-dev package lets you compile dynamic extensions to PHP, in our case XDebug.

Once I was done with that, I simply asked the console to execute this command:

sudo pecl install xdebug

and wooh, it works!