Python and birthday musings

Well another year slips by, and with it a certain inevitability of slowly reaching thirty. I’m reliably informed that thirties are the new twenties so I wait with baited breath to make my own judgment.

I first started this blog up over a year ago firstly to make use of my web hosting which each year I seem to fritter away. Secondly I wanted to use it as a bit of an experiment in self promotion to see whether anyone wanted to get in contact, and perhaps even read what I had to say.

On that front I guess its been a success, I’ve hooked up with a few friends of old and even get the odd occasional link for things like my unobtrusive javascript pop up.

The one area where I’ve failed, is to write as many interesting posts as I’ve had ideas. Sitting here, I’ve got 9 posts still in draft form which will probably never see the light of day. Its a real shame as it is all stuff which isn’t very well documented and would benefit other developers having to go through the same learning curve as me when getting to grips with a new technology.

I guess part of my problem has been, no sooner have I picked up a new technology and got to grips with it have I picked up another and started fiddling with that. Gold fish syndrome I like to call it.

In part it is down to the sheer pace I’ve worked at over the last year. At times it has been pretty unrelenting, and whilst it has been tough going at some points, overall I feel pretty proud of what I’ve achieved. Looking at the Mamas & Papas site today it is virtually unrecognizable both from a design and development perspective, and feel honored to have worked with a really great bunch of like minded individuals to make it happen.

One thing that I had hoped to do is spread my wings and make a concerted effort to look at other languages. I’ve worked with PHP over the past 8 years and whilst it is a great language I do feel a little stifled on a number of levels. In particular PHP’s shallow learning curve (the thing that first attracted me to it) almost fosters a level of medicority within the PHP community. Looking at many message boards I see too many PHP hackers and very few people talking about objects, patterns and enterprise level applications built in PHP (Sitepoint PHP Application Design notwithstanding). This brings me nicely on to my second point regarding PHP, given the lack of enterprise level applications there are very few opportunities for me to progress further as a developer without relocating or moving further towards management (another problem associated with mediocrity and old age combined).

In particular I was very keen to look at Ruby on Rails but the Pragmatic Programmers book seems to be stuck on chapter 9 and not moving anywhere fast!

One language I have recently began to look in to in more detail is Python, which has turned out to be somewhat of a revelation to me. Whilst working for PA Sport I ended getting a little too involved with Perl and have gone back to it from time to time for small tasks. Having a windows development platform isn’t particularly conducive to getting the best out of Perl and the fact most of the packages that interest me are broken or outdated made me begin to look at alternatives.

Enter Python.

Python was originally mentioned to me some time ago, but I never did much to look in to it further. One lunch time I thought I’d look in to it out of curiosity and found myself devouring the online version of Dive Into Python.

Python really does have a shallow learning curve (yup spot the contradiction), an understandable syntax unlike Perl which means you can just get things done. Getting things done is something I welcome with open arms. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve written recursive directory watchers, ftp publish scripts, db update utilities and command line utilites for merging between SVN repositories.

I would hate to say I’m anything other than a Python hacker at the moment and my code would probably make most Pythonistas shudder. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

Finally. That killer app I dream of developing still hasn’t come to fruition. But there is another year to try and make it happen. This time next year we’ll be millionaires Rodney…..