I’ve recently handed in my notice, and am leaving COSMIC. As is the way of these things though, everything has got quite interesting all of a sudden.
For instance, there has been quite a lot of interest in the car share booking system that I wrote for www.moorcar.co.uk – it is a curious situation to be in. In terms of intellectual property everything I developed at COSMIC has to stay at COSMIC, clearly this is both good and bad.
Bad in that everything I have written over the past two and a half years is not mine and as it stands I have some nice solutions in place now, solutions which I know inside out and can drop into place.
Good in that these times of transition give one time to learn new things and a brief breathing space to develop new things. I’ve been taking this time to put together a new toolbox of code and to throw myself into object orientated PHP.
I’m also taking the time to get really up to speed with CakePHP, I’m putting together a skeleton with everything you need at the beginning of a web project, security, pagination, pages, uploads etc.
All in all the bad shrivels into insignificance, writing code is process of learning day by day, of course it doesn’t matter that I can’t use that code. When I it need I can just write again, better, have learned from experience.
The really interesting thing is that COSMIC are considering making Rocket, the CMS framework I developed into an open source project. This is intriguing – but also a bit scary. I am proud of it, it is fast, stable and flexible, it contains some elegant solutions. However it also contains rubbish, dead ends and blind alleys where the development was going in one direction and then it changed, unresolved philosophical issues… if the project was made open source it is a bit like one of those dreams where people imagine themselves walking down the road naked (I have never had one of these dreams) – people get to see everything. To be fair I think it would need a bit of work before it was suitable or made sense in wider context. On the other hand I would be able to legitimately use all that code. It also has a very cool logo, designed by my friend Hannah Storie.
That’s quite an interesting path for COSMIC to take. I assume that Rocket will be cleared up and then be made available for download, but if a client wants a CMS website then we’ll still charge the same fee?
I’d really like to see a rebuild of Rocket now that you are getting into Cake and object orientation. I’d like to see it stand back from accessibility slightly and go for a more AJAX type path.
its annoying when i look back at the work i did and realise i was crap
Crap? That’s an awesome logo :D
I love the rocket – hell I love rockets… they are so evocative.
Frankly who cares how they charge or not for rocket… not me.
p.s. my new book on OO programming arrived.
Mmm, OO programming. Is it goooooooooooooood?
The book is great actually. You can get the technical bits in lots of places – the syntax and garmmar if you want – BUT the actual philosophy behind OO is often hard to find and the examples don’t make sense in a web context. (It is just assumed that it is the correct way to do things – the proper, grown up way)
For me it is about structure and how you manage your code…
i only just read the bit about you leaving cosmic! where are you going next? and how come your leaving?
It is the right time to move on. It is bloody hard sometimes not having somebody I can bounce ideas off and I’d quite like to work closely with some more programmers / developers… anyway there’s four mouths to feed now!