Gold Coast Theme Parks

One of my mates asked me to setup a CMS for him so he can develop his own sites without my assitance. After a bit or research I found Drupal and Joomla to be two of the top players in the game. After 30 minute of investigation with Drupal I was able to do pretty much everything that was required. Joomla on the otherhand still had me baffled after 30 minutes, the tool looked great and certainly looked powerful but I decided to give up on it as I needed something simpler for a non techy guy to use. Im sure Joomla was would do a great job at CMSing but if I could not figure out what to do in 30mins, there was no way my mate would be able to use it.

His first site using drupal is about the gold coast theme parks, check out www.gold-coast-theme-parks.com. If you need accommoation nearby, try gold coast accommodation as it has great hotel deals in near by.

eWorldholidays

The eWorldholidays guys are at it again building more travel sites. Here is a list of of travel sites they have build so far.
fiji accommodation
brisbane accommodation
gold coast accommodation
noosa accommodation
great barrier reef accommodation
sydney accommodation
melbourne accommodation

Looks like the new sites are very static in nature atm, I wonder if they will become more searchable like fiji accommodation site?

Programming teams somethings sux

Sometimes working in a team of programmers sux. Especially when the people in your team have vastly different values. For example, I like writing code that can be reused across the code base - following an XP methodology. Next time I need to write something similar, hopefully most of the code exists, and the job will take very little time to complete. Where others see reuse as bad coding practice it can break other code. This is just one simple example of hundreds. Other people in my team either don't have any values they just follow a pattern, or all they care about is getting it to perform as quickly as possible without thinking about reusability or maintainability, or they just don't give a crap! For me I seem to face a constant battle of trying to follow XP practices in a sea of people that are completely different to me. Instead of trying to enhance my software crafting by sharing ideas and having a reasonable conversations, I'm constantly being drained by developers who have vastly different options. It would be nice to be back in a team of like minded developers were discussions lead to something better!

My solution for now is to go on a fiji holiday.

Twitter

I thought I'll jump on the twitter band wagon and give it a shot to see what twittering is all about. I found a couple of friends in twitter and added myself as a follower. I was hoping I could see what they are doing on a regular basis but it seems they have forgotten about twitter and have left it.

I recently become a twitter follower of fiji holiday since I was thinking about going to fiji soon, I thought I'll see what happening over there. They seem to be an active bunch, adding new functionality to the site and listening to peoples comments that twitter back to them. I always appreciate website owners that take interest in other peoples ideas.


Fiji holiday also shows their recent twitters on their home page. I didn't really think this twitter thing was such a big deal till one starts to participate in it. People not only use it see what friend/family are doing but to also to use it like a mini blog. I guess that probably what it really is.

Fiji Holiday

I'm thinking about going to fiji next year. I found this great website for fiji accommodation that had lots of great info and tops rates on fiji. But I'll think I'll wait a bit it seems like the aussie dollar is getting stronger so I might get a better deal in the coming months.

One of the islands I was thinking of going to was Mamanuca Island. It seems to cater for all sorts of stuff like weddings , romance, scuba diving. I haven't done any scuba diving before that that should be a buzz.

Side Effects and Functional Programming

Side Effects and Functional Programming - Matthew Podwysocki

One of my first posts at CodeBetter was in regards to side effects and how, when unmanaged, can be truly evil. Today, I want to revisit that topic briefly in regards to functional programming and managing side effects. When I was out in Redmond a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Erik Meijer to discuss functional programming among other topics. In there, we discussed a number of issues around managing side effects and state in your code, and how both C# and F# don't intrinsically support such a concept. Languages like Haskell, of course do with IO monads and other such monadic structures. Whether languages such as F# and Erlang are not pure functional programming languages is another matter, due to the fact that you don't have to declare when you are side effecting (reading a database, writing to console, spawning a process, etc).

Side Effecting Functions are Code Smells

Side Effecting Functions are Code Smells - Matthew Podwysocki

I know the title might catch a few people off guard, but let me explain. Side effecting functions, for the most part, are code smells. This is a very important concept in Domain Driven Design (DDD) that's often overlooked. For those who are deep in DDD, this should sound rather familiar. And in the end, I think Spec# and some Design by Contract (DbC) constructs can mitigate this, or you can go the functional route as well.