Chaosplay

Since I started working on my project, I have been realizing that I am coding like I did back in college. I am writing everything from scratch. Keeping everything neat and clean as if I will be submitting my project to a professor for a grade. So far I have been working on common tasks like user registration, session control, searching Amazon. I really want to get to exciting parts of programming core logic of my application. But I want to do everything my way. I like simplicity. I don’t want to learn someone else’s library. I guess I don’t mind re-inventing wheel.

At SXSWi, I discovered Facebook Connect. I fell in in love with it. My target demographics are same as Facebook’s. Facebook Connect can take care of user registration and session management.

Then I started working on Amazon web services part. Getting data from Amazon is easy but exciting. But ten other tasks like input validation, caching, parsing response and other tasks are boring.

Yesterday, somewhere on web I read about CakePHP. Since then I have been looking into different PHP Frameworks. Most of the time I was looking for reasons not to use any Framework. How can I trust someone else’s code. But then I saw this presentation and this convinced me to use frameworks.

Here are 2 main points that convinced me:

• Do I want to make a wheel or a car? When I have an idea for car why waste time re-inventing wheel. Basically, the awesomest registration system is not my main product. Any generic system customized a little bit to my needs will do.
• Frameworks will make me organized. Most frameworks use MVC pattern. These frameworks will force you to organize your files better. This will help in long run. For example, if I hire someone, I can tell them to read framework’s documentation. This way I won’t have to explain everything. (I know I should comment my code too).

So which framework to use?

My choice right now is Code Igniter. It is one of the simplest PHP framework. I read documentation, and everything just made sense. Installation seems easy. (I haven’t tested it yet.) There seems to be good community around it. Then it is also one of the lightest and fastest PHP framework. Supposedly, you can use many libraries from other framework with Code Igniter too.

Other frameworks, I want to test out soon are CakePHP and Zend Framework.

I was reading Blake Ross’s interview in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap). He said something about giving an impression as if you are ahead of where you really are. If your project is done only 50%, you say that it is done 75%. The reason is not to mislead but to increase pressure on you to make your lie a reality. Its an interesting concept. Perhaps I will use it .

Blake Ross

I am hoping today i will get some chance to do coding on my facebook project. Last night, I was making a feature’s list for the version 1.0. I am planning to keep whole project fully open sourced. This is more like a proof of concept, therefore, i am not worried about competition.

I guess the first part is to explain what is the project about. It is a simple list of things, stuff, locations, arts and everything else that anyone likes or dislikes. I got idea for this from Acosta and Karl, I was able to integrate their ideas together easily, however, I am working on my idea of dating app in this list.

Maybe later today, I will upload my feature list.