Any longtime readers will know I’ve been thinking about usernames. A little while ago I realized that, while it doesn’t include my name, ‘pushcx’ is a decent enough handle that can be dereferenced uniquely.

Twitter users, please leave your username in a comment with a tip for getting the most out of Twitter. I’d like to avoid as many newbie mistakes as I can. :)

Jeff Atwood (writer of the very popular Coding Horror) snarked about the posts, though, because Fitz works at IMVU, a social virtual world that looks to be aimed at kids and teens.

codinghorror: If I worked on “IMVU: 3D Avatar Chat Instant Messenger & Dress Up Game”, I’d be too embarrassed to blog about it, frankly.

codinghorror: He’s like “our deployment is sweet!” I’m like “dude, you’re deploying a 3d chat game for tweens.” Congratulations, I guess http://is.gd/j4Bh

antumbral: @codinghorror Feel free to ignore the lessons learned by industry leaders like Nexon just because their customers are younger than you.

codinghorror: @antumbral well, let’s just say 3d chat avatar dress-up software was not the cure for cancer I had hoped it would be.

I guess that would sting more, if not for this rhetorical piledriver from another proud IMVU engineer:

Prestemon: Guy whose “About me” page says “I currently work full time on my blog” mocked the place I work for not being a cure for cancer. Speechless.

(Atwood went on to make himself look worse by calling IMVU less honest than porn; I can see it’s intended as an insult, but I can’t see how it makes any sense.)

I think Atwood’s hangup is that work is supposed to be boring:

t’s not easy to reconcile the fact that the software we write each and every day is, for all intents and purposes, mind-numbingly boring. … As unexciting as it may be, it’s our job to do work *exclusively* to benefit our employer, not for own personal satisfaction. That’s just what it means to be a professional. Tedium is Inescapable.

I can’t even count the ways this attitude is wrong. If you think most programming is a boring slog, you’re not programming. You need to automate, abstract, and choose better tools. If you don’t have the imagination to work at a level where you’re solving problems instead of typing out getters and setters, you don’t have the imagination to be a developer, you’re just a typist.

Alex, the DailyWTF owner who wrote the post, spends time every day looking at some of the worst code ever written and he’s reacting to that: people who incompetent or over-complicate because they don’t realize that programming can be simple and straightforward. They reinvent every wheel because they either fail to realize the wheel exists or fail to recognize how it’s the solution to their problem.

And needless to say, business applications are borrrring! Nothing about the programming is stimulating. It’s all a question of managing requirements, priorities, and figuring out how to cram ninety hours worth of work into a seventy hour week to stave off the outsourcing. Raganwald, who only thought he was writing parody

A virtual dress-up world is not unworthy of quality work from software professionals. I’ve never understood that this idea that work shouldn’t be fun, that some jobs are not worth doing well. Fitz and the rest of the IMVU team are doing the us a favor by blogging about the good work they’re doing, and that’s worthy of praise.

 
#!/usr/bin/ruby
 
FILE_FORTUNE = '/path/to/.fortunerc'
FILE_USED = '/path/to/.used-fortunes'
TWITTER_USERNAME = 'username'
TWITTER_PASSWORD = 'seekrit password'
GAP = (2 * 60)..(26 * 60) # gap between tweets in minutes:
 
# A cron job runs the script every minute with the word 'cron' 
# as an argument. It exits immediately unless enough time has passed
exit if ARGV[0] == "cron" and Time.now < File.mtime(FILE_USED)
 
require 'rubygems'
require 'digest/sha1'
require 'twitter'
require 'yaml'
 
 
class Array
  def rand
    self[Kernel.rand(length)]
  end
end
 
class Range
  def rand
    Kernel.rand(last - first) + first
  end
end
 
class String
  def sha1
    Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(self)
  end
end
 
module YAML
  def self.save_file filename, obj
    File.open(filename, 'w') { |f| f.write(obj.to_yaml) }
  end
end
 
 
# load fortunes, loop to pick one randomly
fortune = nil
used = YAML::load_file(FILE_USED)
fortunes = open(FILE_FORTUNE).read.split("\n%\n")
loop do
  fortune = fortunes.rand
  break if fortune.length <= 140 and !used.include? fortune.sha1
end
 
# post it to Twitter
Twitter::Base.new(TWITTER_USERNAME, TWITTER_PASSWORD).post(fortune)
 
# save that this fortune was used
used[fortune.sha1] = Time.now
YAML::save_file(FILE_USED, used)
 
# set time of next tweet
next_tweet_at = Time.now + GAP.rand * 60
File.utime(next_tweet_at, next_tweet_at, FILE_USED)

A short, single-purpose script like this doesn’t cry out for seemingly-fancy techniques like adding to builtin classes. But when you get to the core of the script, it’s obvious. Instead of the noise of a procedural calls for randomness and generating sha1s, the intention is the implementation. The reusable bits of the code are already explicitly extracted, making them easier to reuse.

Now that I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Ruby for a while I keep wishing I could do it in Python. With open classes I can add to the Strings and Arrays that other code returns to mine. I can’t subclass objects I don’t instantiate, the best I could do is write a delegating wrapper class.