James Titcumb

It’s been live for a couple of weeks now, although I haven’t done much promotion of it, so here is word of an “official” announcement of my new portfolio site. Please take a look around and if you have any constructive criticism, feedback or advice, feel free to let me know through the usual channels…

So without further ado, I pronounce www.jamestitcumb.com officially open!

Well this evening Facebook have revealed what PHP developers globally have been speculating about and revealed their big secret.

And boy, this could really change the landscape of PHP as we know it. I’m a great fan of compiling PHP for one reason or another, but I’ve never seen it reliably work. Roadsend is an absolutely fabulous rewrite of the Zend engine that allows compilation of PHP. Unfortunately, there are gaps and certain features are missing (but in the pipeline I’m sure). If you want to make a generic website though without any specific extensions, then Roadsend is great and works great with Apache.

I’m really excited to explore HipHop as it claims to be the bee’s knees, and there’s been a lot of hype over it since the announcement. HipHop claims to improve PHP’s performance by fifty percent, which is great. Not only this but it’s clearly proven to be stable as it’s already in use on 90% of Facebook’s platform which means it’s not a lone developer’s work which is tested on his one box; it’s been tested by millions of users.

The great thing about HipHop is that it actually generates C++ code from the PHP, and compiles that normally (using g++ I think). From what I understand, the hardest part (logically) is converting a loosely typed language to a statically typed language. This means that in PHP you would declare a variable without specifying it’s type, in C++ you have to. From what I understand, HipHop parses all the code and attempts to understand all the uses of variables and types them accordingly.

I’m looking forward to seeing HipHop in action and getting stuck in.

I haven’t done a “personal” update for some time now, so I thought I’d briefly brush over our recent lives. The photo you can see on the left is the current state of our new house that is being built in the new Dickens Quarter development in Portsmouth. As you can see it is coming along well, and the estimated completion date is currently the end of April. It’s exciting to see it come so far and we simply can’t wait to make it our own lovely home.

On the Freyja side of things, she’s drawing close to 10 months old now and is coming on leaps and bounds. She can make “red indian” noises (patting her mouth and making noise), walk around standing up and holding the furniture, put balls into the “learn and sort” helicopter toy I got her for Yule, crawl around on hands and knees with quite a pace, wave, throw tantrums and all sorts of other bits and pieces.

She’s truly a joy and makes me a very proud parent. She also eats us out of house and home, typically getting through a bowl of porridge and yoghurt for breakfast, a slice of bread with topping and a yoghurt and biscuit for lunch, a snack mid-afternoon, and a bowl of healthy home-made food followed usually by 2 or 3 yoghurts. As you can probably tell, she likes yoghurts, but there’s nothing wrong with that as they’re a good source of calcium as Hannah’s milk starts to deplete.

In other news, it’s Hannah’s birthday soon, so if you haven’t been invited (on Facebook of course…) and you think you should be, get in touch.

I had an interesting argument earlier today. One of our websites is being redesigned at the moment, and the page layout has the logo and company name at the top, and below the menu is a subtitle. I noticed that two things which should be the same weren’t, and in doing so noticed that the company name was not in an <h1> tag, but just an <a href=”..”>…

Normally I would do something like this:

<img src="logo.gif" alt="Company Logo" />
<h1><a href="/home">Company Name</a></h1>
<ul>
  <li>About This</li>
  <li>Portfolio</li>
  <li>Get In Touch</li>
</ul>
<h2>We are an awesome company!</h2>
<h3>About This Company</h3>
<p>Content...</p>

Showing here that “Company Name” is the overall most important thing on the page. However, one of the developers here has structured it slightly differently:

<img src="logo.gif" alt="Company Logo" />
<a href="/home">Company Name</a>
<ul>
  <li>About This</li>
  <li>Portfolio</li>
  <li>Get In Touch</li>
</ul>
<h1>We are an awesome company!</h1>
<h2>About This Company</h2>
<p>Content...</p>

If I view the page without CSS, the company logo becomes unimportant and lost, but the “We are an awesome company!” tag line becomes the most important thing on the page. I’ve not come across this different way of thinking before, and I’m just wondering what other people think – what should the <h1> be?

It could just boil down to choice – whether you see the overall site name (e.g. “Company Name”) as the most important thing or something else… Maybe you design your pages in completely different way?

This won’t have been the first time I’ve written about degrees… But I recently noticed a job posting for a server-side developer at Headscape, and in just the third sentence it already got my back up:

We are looking for a graduate who is passionate about the web

This sort of thing in job postings really annoy me. The notion that a degree makes a person better than someone with 3+ years of experience to me is a very narrow-minded way of thinking. Many employers use this sort of thing as a “first line of defence” tactic – to eliminate applicants that are clearly not suited to the job. However, there are many great developers out there with no degree, but many years of experience.

I asked an employee of Headscape about this, and he summarised that he expects they would consider those without degrees. Perhaps because I don’t have a degree it touches a raw nerve with me, because I’ve been very lucky to get where I am.

I got on the “software development ladder” through a good opportunity, because I had zero “years experience” and no degree, and from an employers perspective, a pretty risky option. Because I was given that chance, I now have over 6 years of professional development experience. Others in my 2003 situation might not be so lucky, and because employers require things like degrees, it makes those starter developers chances of getting even a junior job even harder.

It seems an odd concept to me that to get on that ladder, you must spend 4 years at university, wasting money and time, learning what you already know… In this industry* I would disagree that a degree is required, so why do employers still require that candidates have degrees? To me, all a degree does is prove that you can think analytically, but to even learn a programming language properly, you have to think analytically and logically anyway, so surely if you can prove you know the language, you therefore also prove that you can think analytically…

I’d like to see what other people think about this, maybe I’m a minority on this view?

* I specify in this industry because certain other professions, such as medical, I would say that a degree is required.