Life of a Developer

>Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that I don’t spam PlanetKDE this time. I just did a minor modification to my template and last time that resulted in all entries being re-aggregated there…

>Since the great Qt/KDE programming forum run at QtCentre has such a bad ranking at Google I just thought I’d tell the world this: QtCentre’s forum for Qt and KDE programming is great.

Sorry for stealing your bandwidth to bring you this message!

>It is only four weeks left until the I know what to do every other Sunday! According to the pre-season gossip it sounds almost too good – the right team is among the top three.

>Raymond Chen, author of my very favorite web log The Old New Thing, has written a book with the same name. Now you can get a couple of bonus chapters from the book’s site – great! I just have to say that I love it – just making a 33 points list to summarize how to not get your application to run in the Windows 95 MS-DOS prompt makes great reading. At least for the little technologist that lives in all of us. I still remember the joys of trying to writing my own feeble snippets of code doing something in extended mode. They probably would not run in Windows 95.

By the way – I’ve met him and can testify that he actually speaks Swedish :-)

>I recently re-discovered the folklore site. It is a collection of stories and photos related to the original Macintosh in one way or another. It seems that the site hasn’t been updated in a while, but the stories still makes a nice read. My favorites are the engineering stories showing nice solutions to problems and the evolution of pieces of software – all mixed with portraits of the people involved.

>I’m getting to closer to my writer’s leave. I’ve been working on my book project since Christmas but on Monday I will start at a new customer assignment. The new assignment will use Qtopia and embedded Linux so I’m really looking forward to it.

During my leave I’ve learned a few things:

1. You cannot, efficiently, try to churn out a large amount of text on one subject every day for more than around two weeks.
2. Varying languages is hard. Writing for weeks in English and then having to write for three days in Swedish was hard – but it was even harder to get back up to speed in English. (Notice that I’m a native Swedish speaker).
3. Developing examples on one subject and varying by writing the text about other examples developed earlier helps providing variation, thus increasing productivity.
4. Spending eight hours on something that you used to do for four hours does not double productivitiy. That requires something like ten to twelve hours.
5. Working for more than ten hours a day on a single task for a longer period of time is pointless.

This might sound very negative, but I think that this time has been a great experience.

>I guess that it was bound to happen – every writer’s worst enemy. Writer’s block. I just cannot seem to finish a complete chapter right now – instead I’ve spread my efforts to avoid sitting without anything to do.

Right now I’ve been reading up on:

• CMake
• qmake
• Graphics View
• UDP networking

At the same time I’ve written examples for the QHttp, QFtp and QTcpSocket classes (hey – Qt really makes it easy to write this kind of apps).

The only problem is that the dead-lines are rushing towards me and I just cannot seem to get an entire chapter done. Paragraphs – yes, even whole sections, but not entire chapters.

Well. Enough wining from me – get back and write, write, write.

>I’m doing some research for a book chapter on building and deploying Qt applications and I’m wondering if you have an opinion. If so, mail me. I’m e8johan and I use gmail.

The most obvious thing to cover will be QMake and its abilites. This means platform optionals, building a complete project (subdirs, libs, plugins and apps) and the INSTALLS variable. A complement to QMake is QConf. Some platform specifics for Mac and Windows will also be touched (universal binaries, Windows app icons).

Something else that I consider covering is CMake. Is this necessary? Will CMake be so common that it is a good thing to cover in a Qt book?

>It is a great feeling to realize that there are only three more chapters and appendixes to complete before the first round of my Qt book project has been completed. Then there is reviewing ad infinitum left to do and lots of details (index, toc, foreword, etc) but I choose to ignore them for the moment and just feel good for a while.

>Again winter has tried to establish itself here. This is what it looks like from my office window. Lovely – I actually took the chance of playing around with the car (I know – I’m immature). Sadly they are speaking of rain in the evening, but I’m still hoping for the snow to stay for a few days.