FREE: View from the Trenches – Allan Kent

Here at DMXzone we like our authors to share their knowledge with you – sure, mostly it's in depth technical stuff through the tutorials, but just occasionally it's refreshing to take a step back and get some perspective on the type of circumstances they work under. See how our code gurus earn their daily bread and what they worry about in their local market.

 

Today we've got our tattooed, South African residing, PHP hero Allan Kent sharing his opinions on giving the client value for money, getting ahead of the curve, and winding editors up!

DMX: So the Lodestone site - the successful cobbler's children never have any shoes right?

AK: Well don't get me started on designer's <g>

OK that's an internal joke I have with my colleagues here. The front piece is a screenshot of a design I liked – we've got stuff in the making. This is where some of the battles happen here when we start a site.

I want easy to use, functional and informative from a website, sometimes I get the feeling others want "ooh wow look how cool I am at design". The trick is finding a way to have something that looks good, but keeping within the constraints of keeping the site usable, both from a usability and an accessible point of view.

I like to be practical – going back to using open source/free software for a moment. There comes a point where you have to bite the bullet. For example our company has purchased some of the DMXzone extensions because they are well written and they work. They make things I want to do for clients a lot quicker and easier - like the DMXzone File Upload Plugin – it saves me grunt work.

DMX: Any particular individuals you really respect in the business?

AK: There are a number of guys who contribute to PHP and do work on that, that deserve respect because they know their stuff and put together some cool things. It's difficult to single people out - it's not like in design where there's a core of guys who everyone knows about and you can pinpoint one person who's really good in a style you enjoy.

There's some great open source products out there and too many to mention – gallery is one that's really well written, and phpmyadmin of course

I'm getting a kick out of a product called RealBasic at the moment. It's a lot like Visual Basic (uses the basic language) but it compiles executables to run under Windows, Mac and Linux. We run a fairly heterogeneous network here and so it's really neat to be able to build something that will run on everyone's desktop without having to fall back to a web interface. Often there are things that you want to be able to do that don't work well in a web browser

DMX: Judging from your IM tag I'm guessing that you're serious about your music, but just how serious? Pixies or Cocteau's?

AK: Definitely Pixies.   I enjoyed Garlands but it's background music I think.   I was never really a big Pixies fan either but they are certainly more upbeat. I own Doolitte and no Cocteau CD's so they have to get my vote.   I prefer music that's got a bit of an edge - early 80's punk (although I was too young at the time to know about it) like Crass or Stiff Little Fingers or some good heavy death or grind metal.

I've been lucky with editors in the past as Chris from apress was in a grind core band so I could distract him from missed deadlines by discussing some bizarre metal band from Sweden and Bruce Lawson (ex-glasshaus/DMXzone) actually introduced me to SLF.   In my defense I found Crass all on my own.   I'm also a huge Coil fan, but more their earlier stuff from horserotavator/hellraiser time than their new electronic stuff.