“Can I take some time to clean up this code? It is horrendous.” The answer should always be yes to this question. However, often times we find ourselves up against walls in the form of budgets, time, due dates and expectation and so the typical “powers that be” at companies often veto the request. My advice to you, dear developer, is to never ask for permission for things you know are vital to your work.

You know your work environment better than I do so perhaps you can ask this question and immediately have the full support of your team. Sad to say that many aren’t so fortunate. They’ll ask their boss if they can take some time to clean up their code, make it efficient and extensible and, while the boss may recognize the need for such tasks, ultimately the boss will simply say “maybe we can do that later”.

Why is this the typical reaction? Because bosses don’t have to read, edit and support the code.

This is folly and every developer knows it. Bosses, (if you’re reading this) putting off a few hours worth of code clean-up now will only turn into many hours or days in the future. So by allowing your developers time to do this much needed code maintenance you’re actually saving your company money. But don’t worry – they’re not going to ask you for permission anymore. They’re just going to do it.

I’m going to be making small adjustments, enhancements, and do some all-out-late-night hacking in order to get this site up to snuff to handle notes, links, mobile photos, mobile notes (or, anything too long to fit on Twitter), and videos. I’ve already put the most recent mobile photos in the sidebar and spruced up the way WordPress shows the mobile photos category. I’ve got a lot more planned although I doubt the overall design of this site will change much.

I plan on sharing some of the code I write here on the blog too. So expect the geek knob on this thing to get turned up a bit. (You’re probably thinking, wasn’t the geek knob already at 11?).

I also plan on sharing a lot more Viddler-development related information through this site. As I look around at how other Evangelists are spreading information about their respective products – I see that I’m lagging behind. I don’t want to give any excuses, but, Viddler has been pretty focused on growing our Business services lately. And we’ll continue to be. But I’m going to take some time to spruce up our developers offerings as well as see if I can create some energy behind development on top of our platform. If you’re developer, stay tuned.

Onward! Upward!

Kyle Slattery, Viddler’s Lead Social Developer, recently released a nice little PHP-snippet for Facebook application developers:

“While building the Viddler Facebook application, I needed to create a pagination tool that worked just like Facebook’s. After looking at their HTML and their logic of what pages to display, I came up with one, which I’m releasing for anyone to use.”

Simple. Straight forward.

If you are a developer, whether or not you are interested in building an application, web site, or service using Viddler’s APIs.  Please chime in with some of your thoughts, if you have a moment.

Thanks in advance:

Source: What do you really need? In Viddler’s Developers group.