and a little bit messy -LW
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good chemistry is complicated, and a little bit messy -LW |
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| PerlMonks |
A small step...and a giant leap for Bodby Bod (Vicar) |
| on Sep 07, 2023 at 10:05 UTC ( #11154285=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
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My 1000th post! It's a little under 3 years since I created an account here on Perl Monks. For many years, I'd occasionally visited The Monastery thanks to Google leading me here when I asked a Perl-related question - which was quite frequently. But, back in November 2020, I had a few new projects going on and thought I needed to "raise my game". I had no concept of what that actually meant. My expectation was that I'd learn a few new coding styles, be a bit quicker and, perhaps, a bit clearer. What has actually happened, and continues to happen, is that my whole approach to writing code has changed...drastically! Allow me to illustrate by way of an example... Just this week I was writing some code for the admin part of my partner's website Pawsies. We need to be able to upload pictures of dogs that we look after, and it's helpful if those pictures are square so they display consistently. The whole website uses Template - something I discovered in The Monastery. The web scripts are in their own directory and not mixed up with the other site files, again a learning from The Monastery. The upshot is sites that are easier to navigate, easier to link to as everything is not in the cgi-bin and easier to maintain. However, it goes much further than that. In the past, if I wanted square images, I would have hard-coded the logic to produce them into the script that needed them. But this week, instead I wrote a module to do only that operation. It is where my thought process started, it was not an afterthought. The design started with deciding exactly what it was supposed to do and by jotting down how I would know if it was successful. The basis of a test! I then looked to see if there were any extra generalisations that could be made to make it more useful to other people or when I reuse it elsewhere. So, a resizing parameter was added to change the size of the square image and a position parameter was added to determine where abouts the square is taken from in the original image. Only then was the code written followed by the tests... Once the tests all ran fine, it was bundled up and uploaded to CPAN for all to use. Currently as a dev release so I get some test results before the production release. It's all looking good... Before joining The Monastery this would have been a bit of messy, but functional code locked away somewhere in a difficult-to-maintain script. I considered CPAN modules to be for other, superior "proper" coders...not for me. Now I look for the best way to do it for my needs now, my needs in future when I come to maintain the code or need similar functionality and for the needs of the wider Perl community as The Monastery has shown me that I have something to contribute as well as to learn. Watch out for a testing question coming soon - one of the tests for Image::Square required visually inspecting the output image and I don't know how to convert that into a usable test...see, lots more to learn and that's something I fully embrace! Thank you to everyone who has helped, inspired, questioned and critised me over the last 1000 post - it really is appreciated 👍
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