Is the gap between "good developers" and "bad developers" getting wider?
At one end of the scale we have people like my former colleague Glenn ( http://vanderburg.org/Blog ) who are doing such esoteric software stuff that I am not even sure what he is talking about anymore... things like "domain specific languages" i.e. to solve the problem, first write a new programming language optimised for that problem domain... okay...
and at the other end we have the vendor who coded this:
Select column1 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column2 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column3 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column4 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
Select column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser
which took 140ms to run when "Select column1, column2, column3, column4, column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser" took 15ms...
Sure, rubbish code has always been with us but i just have the sense that the gap is getting wider not narrower... that despite the fact that we have a wealth of coding standards, patterns and practices at our finger tips (just Google it) and that languages and development environments are more powerful than ever that power is delivering more dross not less.
What do you all think?
One of my goals is to create an easy to implement real-time web performance analytics solution that doesn’t rely on fragile, inaccurate javascript tags and I have been playing around with an idea on the weekend. I used the performance measurement and analytics stream generation capabilities of Atomic Lab’s Pion to inspect the HTTP traffic directly off the network and measure the page load performance. I then used some simple Python scripting within Pion to generate a beacon to www.webtuna.com , a UK-based performance analytics provider. I then fired up webpagetest.org and generated some traffic from different nodes around the world and you can see the results graphically in the screen shot below. The end result is a proof of concept that works brilliantly to tell you who is on your website, where they come from, what pages they have visited… and how fast the page appeared to load from the end-user’s perspective. Keep in mind these are page load times, not server response...
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