Sitting on the bleeding edge

Being a web developer is often “hit-me-over-the-head-with-something-heavy” fantastic.

I mean, there are days when you would quite happily sell your computer for a one way ticket to the Gambian rain forests to live out your days swinging through the trees with the monkeys. Actually, that sounds pretty good. How much would you get for a slightly used iMac these days?

These are the days that people with faith call “testing”. You know, the ones where you wake up to find that a major new version of apache / PHP / MySQL / etc has been released and eager webhosts have immediately upgraded without testing backwards compatibility which forces their customers to ask for support on their previously working software. This often lands squarely at the feet of the development team who wrote the product.

Now, the web moves at a breakneck speed. Internet time is like dog years. I actually believe that for every hour you spend on the internet, you age seven hours. So in real life it could take years to develop a new application. Try doing that on the internet and by the time your finished, the scripting engine / database engine you’re developing with will be totally outdated. It’s hard enough as it is trying to develop for one platform when the next version of that platform is near ready for release.

This puts us firmly on the bleeding edge when we often don’t even want to be anywhere near it. As a programmer you have to try and work with what you have but always keep in mind what’s due out next. This can often lead to some very obfuscated and redundant code.

Then there are the new version blues. Those shaky x.0.1 releases that scare even the most hardened system administrators. Hands up who remembers the hilarious CPanel / MySQL 4.0.0 upgrade? It’s funny now - sure but for a few weeks if you listened carefully you could hear the rhythmic pounding of a million system adminstrators heads hitting their desks in frustration.

I write this on the cusp of the new PHP 5 release which promises exciting developments to our favourite scripting engine. It also brings a whole new bucket load of broken scripts, incompatibilies and support tickets. Throw in a few PHP bugs for good measure along with eager-to-please hosts upgrading without a care in the world and you’ve got a receipe for late nights.

Still, at least we don’t have that problem with perl anymore.