Coding in Istanbul 3: Pair Coding with a Friend is Fun

Helping Jeff with his PHP work was a chance to practice some pair coding. I don’t get to do this at work!

I know Jeff since the engineering school. We graduated from the same place in Paris. At the time (about 14 years ago) we were always coding in pairs: nothing to do with agile, we simply had to! The school labs were equipped with one PC/Solaris station for two people at best. We often had to finish projects late at night. Eating pizza at someone’s place, three or four people on the same computer. Of course we couldn’t afford laptops. I even remember having to carry around my tower PC to a mate’s flat in order to finish a late project! Those were tough times… and pairing with people was natural: it didn’t look like an exotic feature from a new methodology. It was just what all students did. 

During our excursions in the coffee-shops and restaurants of Istanbul we both have our netbook. We tried phases where we worked separately, Jeff coding and me looking up some info. But what turns out to work best is to code on the same netbook taking turns at the keyboard. Less chances to get distracted this way. If one loses focus, the other puts him back on track. If one does a typo the other spots it immediately. If we both loose focus we just order another Latte.

We can sustain the pace for about two hours before we become useless.

Quite a good laugh actually…  Just like good old times! Too bad we don’t do that at work…

Coding in Istanbul 2: Reverse Engineering a LAMP Project

We had a salad at Belvu restaurant, Fenerbahçe then carried on coding in True Blue, a cafe overlooking the Sea of Marmara with a nice view to the Princes Islands.

The stack of Jeff’s site is based on PHP/MySql/Apache. I’m more used to the world of C#/ADO.NET/Linq/T-SQL/SQL Server.

It’s funny how web development differs from enterprise apps!

I got into the habit of encapsulating everything and separating layers but the approach used by some PHP devs is more pragmatic. Business logic, data retrieval, building SQL queries and presentation: everything is done in the same .PHP file!

In Windows client development you typically let a data layer retrieve some data objects (via ADO.NET, Linq or something else) then you assign the data object to a grid control. The control takes care of displaying the content of the object, dynamically creating columns and adding rows… In the PHP files I saw the data layer bit (building the SQL, performing the query, retrieving data) appears just a few lines before a while loop that echoes  <td> tags to generate a table for each row of the result set. All layers in the same place.

Also in the code I saw SQL queries were always built on the fly. The first downside of building SQL queries with string concatenation is vulnerability to SQL injection (followed by performance loss due to always rebuilding the query plan and no transactional integrity)… The devs protected the code from injections by using specific PHP functions that parse all user inputs. Why not use stored procedures? Apparently stored procedures are a new thing in MySql: they arrived only in version 5. So I guess they got into the habit of doing away without them.

Regarding the development tools, when working with PHP in Dreamweaver -apart from a bit of color coding- you get absolutely ZERO compiler support. Indentation is manual and there is no intellisense. Comes pretty close to handcarving on stone tablets.

Another funny thing with MySQL: it comes with a large choice of database engines, each one having its pros and cons. It turns out that the default db engine in MySQL is optimised for speed and does not support foreign keys. So by default you work in a system where you can delete parents without deleting childrens and where children can contain a reference to a non existing parent. You’d better be sure that’s what you want, most of the time it’s not…

Coding in Istanbul 1: PHP in Turkey

I’m having a çoban kavurma in a restaurant with my old mate Jeff who lives in Istanbul. We stopped for lunch in one of the busy pedestrian streets of Kadiköy on the Asian side of the city.

We spent most of yesterday coding on Jeff’s doctors appointment website. We added a small admin functionality that will save him time when mailing doctors. He’s currently working on getting more doctors registered: it involves finding their details and emailing them one by one. Obviously spamming them all in one go is out of the question so each email is slightly personalised (quoting the doctor’s own website). Yet they all follow the same template so there is some room for automation.

Jeff also needs to track how doctors open and view the campaign emails. Each email contains a number of links: to the appointment’s website, press articles, facebook and to twitter. Pretty clever: each link calls a php on his website that logs the doctor’s identifier along with the identifier of the link. Then he can run a report that shows various stats about who clicked what link…

Good places to take the netbooks out in Turkey include a growing number of restaurants, Starbucks, Gloria Jeans… and Wifi is almost always free!

Gloria Jeans is a great place to sit down with the laptop: more comfortable than Starbucks and less crowded. The one in Ortaköy is perfect: beautiful view to the Bosphorus, 3 levels, smoothies, cheesecakes, tosts (paninis) and free wifi.

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