It really scares me how few good programmers actually exist in this world. I only bump into them professionally and even then, not as often as I’d like. If, for example, I meet someone at a party and he says he codes I’ll put a bet on he or she lacking a huge range of skills.

The sad thing is, I’m not perfect either. I understand stacks, and linked lists, and bitwise operations, and all the different logical operations. I find loosely typed languages annoying and scary – I hate orphaned variables, do-nothing functions, and the spaghetti that seems to make up so many modern systems. But I’m easily confused by OOP, understanding only the basics and not really having a full grasp of things like polymorphism. My excuse being that I’m a database and procedural languages expert instead. But the modern world seems to demand skills in a range of languages, and the slightly obscure stuff of my past (PL/I, Adabas Natural, PeopleCode, SQR and Application Engine leap to mind) aren’t relevant in this WEB2.0 world.

Now, I’m getting to the point of this post… I found a great post by an Indian blogger titled How To Become a Good Programmer and it’s an excellent summary of the knowledge required to be a quality developer. Some isn’t strictly a must-have – I’ve known astonishing developers who wouldn’t make half his list… but I think as a broad guide it’s spot on.

I’m going to shamelessly nick a few images here from a site we designed, manage and host (Sniff Petrol) , but which is run and written by someone else. In finding this he showed a great example of why you should think about any new features you add to a website.

The idea seemed good enough – Car Magazine added a search terms Cloud, rather like a tag cloud, to their website to show what people were searching for. Problem is though, with any user generated content you have to watch carefully for abuse.

First off, they seeded the search cloud with a few terms that they obviously felt the aspirational and tasteful visitors would like – such as Aston Martin Vanquish, BMW M1, Ferrari and so on:

So far so good. Read more

We finally built GPL theme for hosted versions of WordPress! And very pretty it is too…

We’ve been writing custom themes for clients for quite some time now, and felt it was time to give a little something back to the WordPress community.

So we did a fully GPL theme, complete with a Fireworks png, all sliced up and ready to be re-exported in such a way that you can completely change the site’s design without ever touching a line of code. You have to work within the limitations of the graphical elements, but there’s no doubt there’s a lot you can do.

You’ll see variants of the theme in use around the place – on the satirical motoring site Sniff Petrol on Dave Coveney’s site, and in a few other places soon we hope. We have high hopes for the underlying platform of this theme – it brings with it a navigation widget to give you fine control of an elegantly styled sidebar, an easy to customise contact form page template, and much much more. It’s a theme for people who like to expand what they can do with WordPress. It’s also, of course, xhtml 1.0 transition, works on every browser we tested on, and the work of a dedicated team of professionals.

Anvil Theme Official Demo and Download Page

So we’re hoping to be one of the first to congratulate WordPress on hitting the two million blogs mark.

What can we say? Well done!

To us it’s big news – we’ve made a strategic decision to be increasingly involved in WordPress.  With the up and coming premium themes marketplace we’re hoping to be involved with, coupled with the increasing use of WordPress as a CMS, we believe the flexibility and power of this system makes it the one to be involved with – whether for blogging or for building general sites.

So here’s to the next two million.  Seems like WordPress is doubling every six months or so.  Which would mark out eight million blogs by Xmas 2008.  Who’s laying bets?