Hackathon

Hackathon - I heard this term couple of years ago when my boss John mentioned it. It sounded like a great idea given the demanding workload a smallish start-up can have, and so much little time I had to try out other things. So trying a new POC (Proof Of Concept) sounded like a great idea - and I decided to choose Ajax implementation which was quite a new thing at that time. It did work out quite well - and since it was a standalone demo, it didn’t require to play within the limitation of system framework and also gave freedom to do add some string literals, and raw code snippets without calling the regular internalization routines and resource bundles. It was amazing to see how much coding productivity one can have for one such ad-hoc demo without any of the regular system limitations & rules. Besides - it’s really refreshing to work on something totally unknown & challenging without much of documentation!! You absolutely gotta love it if you are a programmer at heart!!!

Anyway - the first hackathon went well and was successful. We didn’t have any formal hackathon as such later - but I have many such unofficial ones when I get ‘free time’ (ahem!) or when I feel like!!

I think it’s more of an attitude - the basic curiosity about ‘How things work & why they work the way they work!’ I think this is most essential quality of a programmer - curious mind and willingness, rather eagerness to learn & try new things!!! And the excitement of experimenting, the high & bliss you get when you see such experimental prototypes working is unparalleled. And That’s hackthon!!!

Dumbster - Dummy SMTP Server

This is one nice tool that used some time ago - found very useful to simulate SMTP server on local machine. Especially very good for writing unit tests if you do test infected programming/extreme programming -
http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/

I’ll try and share such small tips/utilities here as and when possible!

Literals/Constants on LHS

This is something I learnt long back…years ago. As a part of “best coding practices” when C/C++ ruled programming world. This is a simple yet powerful tip for programming in C/C++, JavaScript and even Java (though condition must be boolean here)-

You should always put literal/constant or value on the LHS and variable on the RHS in if condition for equality!