Developers, developers, developers, developers!

This week we talk about the common hurdles facing coders, and offer some views about how to overcome these issues.

Patrick, Shane and Dave are joined by Charlie Von Metzradt (homepage, twitter) – a sys-admin and Coder with Demonware (homepage, wikipedia), and Gareth – a manager/sys-admin with HEAnet (homepage, wikipedia).

We first threw our conversational lasso over the topic of frameworks, how they can be a useful tool to get off the ground quickly, but are sometimes a hindrance when it comes to scaling up your application. Shane spoke about how OpenCV has saved him about a man year of coding in his college Final Year Project, but has added some overhead. Patrick and Gareth spoke about Ruby on Rails is a great platform for rapid deployment, but very quickly its idealist abstraction layers result in unmanageable overhead, requiring a complete rewrite of some libraries or modules.

[15:26] Next we moved onto managing client expectations, with David explaining that clients might think that in a feature freeze to fix bugs no work is being performed. Charlie suggested that the client should be given a login to the bugtracker to show that work is being done.

[18:54] Finally we moved onto the topic of developer/system administrator relations, inspired by the recent Shot of Jaq episode, Developing the Devop. If you haven’t heard of Jono and Aq’s latest Internet media adventure yet, then you should check it out.

With Charlie mediating these two groups at his place of work, he spoke about how developers often fail to write coherent logging tools, leading to admin frustration. Gareth suggested that developers package their code and test the unpacking on a testing server before an admin moves it to production. This way a developer will see any potential problems and will familiarise themselves with an admin workflow.

Patrick mentions Capistrano, a deployment tool. Charlie also mentioned a tool called CheckInstall which will create a RPM or Deb when making from source, to keep track of the files modified by the make and easily uninstall the application you’ve just compiled.

So, leave your thoughts below; what middle ground have you found works between Developers and Sys-Admins? How have you best managed a paying client? And at what point have you found a framework to be more hassle than help?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.