Head.SmackOnTable();

Iv been giving this some serious thought, and the whole job applying process isnt that fair. Your potential future is riding on how you perform in an hour or less, how you perform on some good, or potentially shoddy questions. But that isnt the point of my blog post today - how many employers tell you how crap thier code is when you join their company? I mean seriously, how many of them sit down with you, with a code sample or three and show you what their stuff is like?

For me, a big difference between just Programmers and Developers is the way the UI is laid out in applications. I tend to find that programmers orient their UI based on what they would like to see, where as Developers would tailor them to what the average user using the system would like to see.

An example of what a programmer would like to see is as follows:



This is taken from one of my current "Work" projects - I sincerely hope my bosses don't mind (I must remember to ask them about it on Monday) - but to prove my point, this is what a programmer would like to see - the IDs that are used in the database, so that you can run queries on it, it tells you in plain text if its active or inactive, and the select button is just auto generated by the gridview.

Whereas a developer would do something like this:



Its alot more "User friendly" even though it does hinder some things for developers - you cant outright see the ID for the hotel, and what are silly icons doing? (Its very straight forward to work out which icons mean what, considering there are only two of them :) ) - but from the user's point of view, its alot easier to read and its easier on the eyes - they dont need to worry about IDs and stuff - they can just pick their item and go on with their business (Actually, recently, I have added the country and city to be appended to the name, just to make their lifes a little bit easier)

So what are you, a developer or a programmer ?

Well on the weekend I attempted the London to Brighton bike ride, not the official route, but a much more INSANE and PAINFUL route, because I am a retard and used google maps (That and I dont know quite a few parts of the official route). I made it, but after about 50 odd km (just after turners hill) my GPS lost its 3d fix, and I was relying on its 2d map to navigate me allll the way to the beach, which I made, eventually. Total time was in the region of 4 hours, which isnt my best time, but in my defence it was bloody cold, wet in places, and bloody windy. That and I screwed up the route, and went up Caterham Hill, for NO REASON!

Anyway, heres a height map of the route (most of it, till turners hill, then it went a bit funny after that and then just stopped):

Well I guess I have to post another item about how my old company are rather pathetic - they are refusing to hand over my First Aid Certificate, which I did when I was employed by them.

How very mature.