The type I wanna be

 3rd July 2008 by Chris

I have been misled by my understanding of a "Hacker". I've always thought and believed that "hacking" is a selfish act.. an act of abusing intellectual ability.

My misconception

When I was young, back then, CDs were burned at the highest speed of 32x.. my CDROM can only read those burned up to 16x. It was a terrifying fact that I cannot buy the high end CDs because of financial limitations. I had to stick by the 'old' CDs that were sold at a cheaper cost because they had to get rid of the 'slow' CDs. I end up scavenging those CDs that nobody would even like. I take whatever interests me. Sometimes its frustrating to find the ebook CD you want burned at a higher speed I cannot read. At worst, the seller doesn't even know the speed used for burning and sell out a copy that I cannot even use. But there is one though that I wanted and was burned at a lower speed.. it was a "Hacking Tools" CD.

This was one of my favorite CDs. I learned that the CD I bought won't teach me anything about 'good' pride. By good, I mean the pride that you get from giving your projects a good thought, ample time of planning and rigorous code development. It taught me about 'bad' pride. It showed me a lot of 'instant gratification' coding. I'd like to call these tricks and 'hacks'.

With this, it kinda stuck in my head that 'hacking' is a negative term. I have confused the "Masters" with the "Crashers".

Writing good code

 13th June 2008 by Chris

It has long been a debate on how to describe 'good code'. What are the criteria for declaring a code to be good, neat, and dry?

My advocacy is to promote writing good quality code. It is by painstaking practice and tons of reading that I get to exercise this advocacy. It is but a long journey, but little steps lead you to understanding and qualifying a code to be of high quality. So what are my benchmarks?

• Long codes are less readable and more likely to fail.

Ruby scripts are far smaller and more compact in size compared to Java codes or C++ codes. Trust me, I've seen some and comparing them to Ruby, reading Java codes or C++ codes that are not mine would take me a longer time for understanding (even if docs and other help materials are present). Ruby has good metaprogamming (that sometimes gets abused because of monkey patching) and produce straightforward codes. Each line would end up more like real English sentences.

If you write ruby codes that take up to more than twenty lines.. hmm.. well, its doomed to fail, for sure. Refactor and review!

• Codes that don't look anything like its API source is really smelly.

APIs are there for you to use as a general sitemap. It is your guide to efficiently write code with ease. Usually, APIs are well documented and even provide examples or snippets of codes to demonstrate its use. The lines of codes involved may also be present for you to inspect its process and even predict if it will pass your expectations.