₦airaland Forum

@SAM_MILLA
Yeah, true. Sorry about that.

@Afam
I would have loved to "continue this tomorrow" but sorry, no be fight. Also, based on the following statement:

Sharing knowledge is not exactly the same thing as collaboration, mind you.

On that. I bid my adieu, yield the floor to the actual topic and remove my notification to this thread.

I knew this post would solicit such comments

It didn't occur to me to post the error until after I closed my browser. As at the time I was on the site, I had refreshed 3 times and got the same error.

Oh well. I will chalk this one up to "next time have more proof"

@Afam
Well, funny you didn't ask but I will tell nonetheless:

I have 2 jobs actually. I have a professional job (where I work with a team, aka collaboration) and I have a side job (where I work by myself. Why? Because I can't afford to pay for workers so I make do with my situation. That in no way means I know it all. As they say, na condition dey make crayfish bend) where I do maybe 5 jobs a year. Basically, it is for residual income.

Having said that, I still stand my ground that working in groups as opposed to working in isolation is the best. You benefit that way from economies of scale. And yes, and perhaps the word was too strong for you, when you work alone, sure you know what you know, but it is limited, hence my use of the word, "incest" or "in-breeding" - all you know is based within you, not shared between peoples. When you die, it dies with you. If something tragic happens in your life (I am not wishing it on you but things happen), it is trapped within you. Counter that with sharing knowledge with different peoples, benefiting form that knowledge and applying it to your daily lives. Why do you think it is a fact that a business partnership or joint stock situation is better than sole proprietorship?

By the way, your alternative power business, you say you are working with 4 pple. That my friend is collaboration. Why do you have 4 pple wen you could easily run that by yourself? I won't make any assumptions and wait for you to answer that, if you so wish.

@Afam
Sorry, but my works are not for public display. If you want to know me and/or what I do, (virtually) meet with me and I will be glad to show you what I have done.

I know who I am and what I can and can not do and as far as this issue is concerned, I can and have done it, so much so that I don't even bother writing it from scratch - I just copy, paste and change around db parameters and db form field names. Am I bragging? Nope. I am just saying it like it is.

I could paste the code on here but what help will that do? The poster will just copy, paste, experience problems and then come back here to ask us to debug the code. I have seen it on other posts on here. Why would this one be any different? Besides, the poster won't be learning this way.

Again, if he is on a tight deadline, my advice is to find someone who will do it for him. It doesn't have to be me, but if it is, I will be 1000% honest, I have bills and won't do such for free. Debugging html, sure but not business logic.

@webemarald:

You may not want to admit it but even though your "intention isnt to rubbish anybodys work, but the truth be told and it shld serve as a warning to all of us , for christs sake if u cannot design, find someone who can and pay something for it.", the mere fact that you have raised the issue shows that that is exactly what you did. What I find interesting too is that just as you pointed it out, you are quick to give advice which in my opinion, is sound.

Look, when someone is worthy of praise, you give it to them 1000%. Alternatively, when someone does something wrong, you point it out as well. If nothing else, it will help either the person or others familiar with what is going on. For example, and I blv this comparison works here, if you noticed a kwak doing something wrong at a reputable pharmacy and you pointed it out and I said what I said, would you come back and say, you didn't want to rubbish their works? Believe me, you have helped enlighten those who probably had in mind to produce such a site. In the end, we are all better for it.

Who knows? By pointing this site out, one of us in here could contact the company, present them with a better portfolio, do a better job, land a good reference and make money as a result.

You did a good thing by showing us that site. If I find similar, I will definitely share. Generally speaking, we have to bring up the quality of our work. That my friend, is the cold, hard, bitter truth.

Not to justify bad code but I just wanted to bring it to your attention that no one is immune to having a bad website. Obama raises millions in a month yet his site, including this link that I got from his campaign via email, has problems (as at the time of this writing - 545pm naija time, June 20, 2008):

https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/bignews?source=20080619_PF_ND_L1 (issues opening an inc file)

How does he expect me to give him money if the page isn't up and running?

Folks, and I am speaking in general, I know many of us beat our chests and say we do everything from the graphics, to code to the dba stuff. However, if your site doesn't pass muster, quality assurance wise, all your work is for naught.

Is this a test or r u experiencing problems? If the latter, what is the error code you are getting? It would help for us to know.

@josy
Yes, I can do it and as a matter of fact have done it many, many times.

Will I do it for you? If you are paying, yes but if you aren't, no, unfortunately not. Why? I have mouths to feed.

@smartsoft
my email address is public. all u hv to do is send an email

@josyisback
Trust me. You will need more than copy and paste. Why? because when something goes wrong, since you are copying and pasting without understanding, you wont know how to debug.

Just give it to someone else to do. That's the best advice i can give you, which something tells me you probably won't take cos you want to chop by yourself and so r willing to work hard and not smart.

wat u r asking for my friend is a full blown app, an app that can't be implemented on a forum. If you have no idea of what to do, I strongly suggest you pay someone to do it or c if there is someone willing to collab with you, that you get them involved.

Hopefully, when you built version 1, you made it such that you could easily plug in other sections.

I am not the type to laugh when I see anotherz work as I believe in getting what you pay for however, once I opened this page, I just cdnt help myself:

1) Stuff is everywhere
2) Looks like that game (I forget the name) where u hv a 4 x 4 board with 15 pieces in it and your aim is to arrange the numbers sequentially.
3) Broken images
4) When I clicked "powered by", I get a site that lists files and folders.

How much did he charge the company? 15K? How reputable is this company? I ask cos based on this website, I would probably never buy anything from them. The "webmaster" has totally ruined their reputation IMHO.

What the "webmaster" in question needs is more than basic schooling. I am thinking public flogging at this point.

Capitalism at its best.

If na naija, no b cake dem for send dem, na air forces or assassins. Kai! We have some ways to go in our obodo country

It all amounts to speculation which is a dangerous game. As with any such type ventures, I say do it for the residual income as opposed to as a primary source of income. That way, you don't find yourself jumping out of the window of a storey-building one day because you have lost all your money.

Sure, many are probably making a killing off of this. However, as we like to say, all fingers aren't the same length.

@Afam
True talk

I respect all ideas but am entitled to my opinion which in this case, I will still stand by.

Also, I said:

I doubt you would want to hire such a person as you would be losing money on the others.

Nowhere there did I mention owning/running a company. After all, I do remember my economics/commerce classes from sec sch which says there are 3 forms of ownership: Sole Proprietor, Joint Stock and Partnership

Yeah, it's just another catch phrase like AJAX. The technology has been around for a while but like AJAX, someone came up with a marketing scheme to make them popular.

It could be that the client is one who is aware of, among others, possible vulnerabilities that exist on windows platforms. I don't blame him/her. There are some who don't even regard windows as an operating system (the billions gates has made aside). In recent times, there are in fact many organizations that are moving away from Windows to Unix/Linux.

All you need do is ask around for a web host that offers Linux hosting and trust me, there are more than you can imagine.

Definition(s) of collaboration:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/collaboration

Please note that it doesn't specify a large number.

History of Hotmail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

Please note that there are 2 names on there, not 1

History of PHP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

I will give this one to you. However, there is a PHP group (implying collaboration) that currently handles any implementation.

In conclusion, collaboration doesn't imply or mandate that you have to have 20 or 30 people to work together. Just as the Bible says (another form of collaboration), "Where 2 or 3 are gathered in my name, there I am also". The point of collaboration is working together and not alone.

Finally, I would like to take you up on another thing you said earlier which is that, "It is possible for one person to know more than a team of say 5 people". Of course, this is true generally speaking however, if you run a company that is out to make money, I doubt you would want to hire such a person as you would be losing money on the others.

@SAM_MILLA
When i saw this post, I said to myself, "I bet that's the whole point and that there are google ads on the site in which case dude just wants to drive traffic to his site to increase ad impressions and revenue" and I was right.

@Afam
I also said:

Unfortunately, in this our obodo Naija where some are willing to charge as low as 40K for a site, unemployment is rampant both of which result in many reading "how to code html in 24 hours" and calling themselves "webmasters" thereafter as well as clients taking advantage of the situation, it is tough to tell someone who just managed to score it "big" to split the meagre proceeds with a fellow developer. On that, I hesitantly have to admit.

Now, is incest a strong choice of words? Probably but I will stand by it. I have worked alone and worked in a collaborative sense and based on my experiences, the +ves outweigh the -ves with respect to collaborating. Again, I state this based on my experiences. By incest by the way, I meant in-breeding of ideas. In other words, no matter how smart one person is, one can only learn but so much on his own as opposed to when he is working with a diverse set of people. No one person knows it all, irrespective of how elegant/functional their sites might be.

Does that clarify things?

@smartsoft
Then that doesn't belong to this post. This is for "collaborative approaches" and not "is collaboration good or not?"

it doesnt hurt at all. Unlike most naija women, i hv a thick skin. I just didn't like the false accusations, thatz all. You could have worded it better.

I can only speak about collaboration with respect to working for my employer. Having said that, I firmly believe that no man is an island and that to achieve the best results, each role of the web/app dev process should be properly delegated and that inter-role relationships should be encouraged for the betterment of any project.

I have worked on tons of projects. Each have a Project Mgr (PM), DBA, UI Developer, Software Developer, Quality Assurance (QA) and Business Analyst. Each role has their part to play. We follow strict software development practices. We go through code reviews, mock releases, etc. Even though we have our distinct roles, if anyone needs a hand and any of us can help out, we do it. For example, though I am a UI developer, if QA comes up with a defect on the back end and it is something I can do, I don't let it go because it isn't my job. Rather, I step up to the plate and do it. Why? Because at the end of the day, if the project fails, the client won't single out any particular role. It is the whole team that fails.

Advantages of Collaboration (for me, at least):
1) You get to work with a diverse group of people, each with their own temperament, attitude, work ethic, etc.
2) You get to learn things that are outside of your domain of responsibility
3) You get to do things in a structured, as opposed to haphazard, way
4) Division of labor ensures that each aspect in the development process is done in an efficient manner

Disadvantages of Collaboration (Again, at least for me):
1) If you are unlucky to work with people with a bad work ethic, you end up doing the bulk of th work.
2) If the project succeeds, everyone gets praised. Conversely, if it fails, even if you had nothing to do with it, you are also labeled as a failure.
3) Does not allow for individual praise.

Those are all based on my experiences in the field. Bottom line, collaboration is very good and I would strongly recommend it. The days of working by yourself in a dark room are over. Today, with no time zones and globalization running amok, collaboration is the new work ethic du jour. Sure, one person can do everything from writing up the proposal to coding the entire site. However, that to me amounts to incest and at best, you learn very little and the project suffers. Unfortunately, in this our obodo Naija where some are willing to charge as low as 40K for a site, unemployment is rampant both of which result in many reading "how to code html in 24 hours" and calling themselves "webmasters" thereafter as well as clients taking advantage of the situation, it is tough to tell someone who just managed to score it "big" to split the meagre proceeds with a fellow developer. On that, I hesitantly have to admit.

Good thread. I am curious to know what others have to say.

@rubbieruth

Thanks for clarifying.

Well, from a bird's eye view, I would say the nav sections need some work (why use arrows?) and the ENTIRE site doesn't have to be green. The content area for one would look better (to me) with a white background.

@olush0la
As my2cents said over and over again, there is no need justifying the original poster's assertions. Doing so, in my opinion, amounts to us having low self-esteem. As my2cents said, if you googled for south african websites and you picked your first 10 results at random, at least half of them would be bad. Of course for someone like me, that wouldn't amount to me passing judgment on the entire South African Web Development sector.

There are bad eggs everywhere. Rather than insinuate, we should all get together and help each other out so that we can all LEARN something and improve as a result.

So,

I have worked with someone who had this pretty nifty software (I could care less about flash and so have never used it but i digress) that could decode any .swf file you gave him. He was so good at it that even when we would give an outsourcing company something to do, and tell them to encrypt is much as they could, if we needed a change done, we wouldn't send it back to the company, we would give it to this guy to decode. What would you say about that?

Bottomline to this is, there are probably many ways to get this done but at the end of the day, such techniques are only as good as the maker and many times are not worth it. Look at it this way, MSFT is proprietary but languages like PHP are open-source and gaining popularity daily. Let's learn from that. No need in hiding stuff that 9 times out of 10, you ended up copying from someone else (letz all be honest now, we are all guilty of this).

@smartsoft
Insults and false assumptions aside:
So what if the code is encrypted? same difference. If I copy and paste the code in a php file, the code will work right? I think Amarao wants a situation where the code is neither usable nor accessible.

In general, as far as layout is concerned, you could obfuscate the code but it makes no difference as a copy and paste will do the trick. Are you going to say you haven't "stolen" anyone's layout or other code online before? Why are you then angry when you see someone using your own code? Let he without sin cast the first stone. That is the whole essence of the web - it's in the public domain.

By the way smartsoft, what is "hard core programming" and does it differ from "regular" or "soft core" programming? Just wondering.

@poster
Forgive me for making an assumption but given the facts that you hv just 4 posts and you are broadcasting this link on various posts, wouldn't it be better if you were to say, "I (or a friend) developed this site and would appreciate it if you reviewed it and let us know what you all think" or something like that?

@hanen
That still doesn't qualify as "All". You can certainly say, "most" but not "all".

The original poster's logic fails courtesy of proof by contradiction.

@Amarao
First and foremost, there are 2 "codes" behind each application - The front end (html, css, javascript, etc) and the back end (business logic - php, jsp, etc).

For the front end, once deployed, there is nothing you can do. They can "view source" and get your front end code. Of course, depending on the kind of logic you have built on the backend, the front end could be pretty useless because it would only help with the code for the layout.

For the back end, if you are hosting the site, then you and you alone have access to the back end/front end code. If the client is hosting it, you are out of luck.

So, why is this so important to you? Doesn't make sense to me. Besides, I would think that legally, any code you write for your client is the legal property of that client once deployed. "View source" aside, if you are really that concerned about protecting your business logic you can either write it into your agreement that you own software rights OR you host the site and write a maintenance contract with the client so that you and only you have access to the code at all times.

Again though, what you want to accomplish makes no sense to me.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do technically. I say, "technically" because there is always an exception to a rule. You might want to try "Bcc"ing your members. This will give the incoming server the impression that the mail is sent to only one person.

The ultimate is for you to, as part of your "welcome" email, to advise your members (telling them this with a bolded font is probably the best) to add your email address to their "white list" and/or to create a rule that tells their incoming servers not to send your emails to their bulk folders.

@uspry1
I actually did. Read my post carefully. Just in case you missed it, I said, "lightbox 2" and not "lightbox". And yes, there is a difference, the main difference being again, that whereas with lightbox 1, you just click on a thumbnail, the photo shows and all you can do is close it, with lightbox 2, you can actually start a slideshow as each photo comes with a "next" and "previous" button. This, I am sure you will agree, is better than opening and closing one photo at a time.

I hope this clarifies things.