Developer Karma

How many times have you been developing a mobile website only to find out that you actually have to type in your horrible development URL into your mobile phone? Well moan no longer with the handy-dandy URL2QR. All you have to do is add this bookmarklet to your browser and what ever page you visit will be turned into a QR code for you to scan with your phone!

I've had the benefit of both doing Quality Assurance and Software Development for many years (usually not at the same time.) Interestingly enough, doing QA has made me a better developer and being a developer has made me better at writing comprehensive testplans. What astounds me about these two roles that work together on a nearly daily basis is they have a communication level that is lower than the US and Russia in the mid 80s.

I'm trying out changing the podcast over to a screencast to save time typing up notes and give more to the user (by actually seeing what I'm talking about.) Please note, this is far more "from the hip" than the podcast used to be so who knows what I'm going to say.

P.S. I'm still creating the audio podcast, it just comes from the screencast.

Have you ever needed to find out where a site visitor physically was for something beyond analytics? I'm talking about things like finding your user on a map or locations of Store X within 50 miles of the user’s current location. Well, I have, and I've found there's not really one solution that fits all users. Sometimes I find myself having to mix methods to provide the best overall user experience and/or changing up my execution depending on my needs.

For the most part you can break it down to three questions:

A few months ago I had the privilege of speaking at DrupalCamp Atlanta.  The talk I gave covered the CMS selection process across multiple languages with Open and Closed source Content Management Systems.  While at first glance it might appear an easy choice to go to your usual CMS, it might not always be the right choice.

I am often presented with visions of poor and haggard open source enthusiasts walking the streets in disarray and varying degrees of sanity.  These programmers, artists and content managers could be working for upstanding corporations earning an honest dollar, instead they sit around working on projects with no monetary value.  It's bad enough that we have hordes of these people already but sadly they are training a new generation of open source zealots to tread in their meaningless empty footsteps.

How many times have you been coding something and it doesn't work even though you've used an api/function call hundreds of times before?  I ran into this the other day with node_load().  For those of you use the node_load function, can you tell me how many arguments it has and what those arguments do (without looking at api.drupal.org?  I know, some gurus can, but can the average module developer do it?)

Have you ever wanted to give money or services to a charity but you just didn't have the time or the cash to be able to do that?  Well, now you and I have no excuses since CommuniCause has now launched and all you have to do is either enter the information on the website or tweet a special hashtag.

CommuniCause is "a campaign that gives America the opportunity to vote online for their favorite 501c3 non profit to win a $25,000 social media makeover" which I think is a great idea since most charities I know are struggling just to keep things going and barely have any type of web presence.  By winning this type of contest it allows a charity to get into an arena they possibly never would have been able to enter and really get their name and message out there.

I need your suggestions of charities since I don't know which charity I should nominate/vote for (I hardly know of any charities).  Could you, my readers suggest charities in the comments as well as vote on CommuniCause?  Once I choose the charity, I'll add the CommuniCause banner to this site so everybody can see it.

Just wanted to let you know that there's a new DrupalEasy podcast (#3) now out there.  If you haven't listened to  our podcast I'd highly recommend that you do if you do any work at all with Drupal (or if you're interested in working with Drupal).  We cover, Drupalcon, SXSW, Setting up a Drupal Theme with Artisteer, the 2009 Google Summer of Code and of course, our module picks of the week!

Check it out, it's free and no animals were hurt in the recording of this podcast.

I'll be leaving for a few days to attend this years US Drupalcon with both the Mindcomet crew and DrupalEasy crew!

If you happen to see me and you follow my blog, twitter or podcast say "hi" (I'll be the guy wearing some type of funny hat with glasses and a soul patch).