Going to be hard to stay on topic with this one, but lets have a go……….
(Warning, mild geek content…. (Its all your fault Dan ;-))
Had a conference call with a few key players in the current project. Up shot was that they needed our gear to do some interfacing with some of their existing equipment and the software system of a third party.
The brief was pretty straight forward; hit a URL, get the CSV response, parse the data, put all of it it into a mysql database but also put some of it in a text file in a specific file format and ftp that file to the third party. Last thing was to set up a way for the third party to trigger an action and send a tweet via Twitter when that trigger is sent.
Got a day and 1/2 to get it going in time for an important demo.
Do 99% of this using PHP.
Easy? Well, sort of. I have never learned PHP, well, not really. We touched it at night school in the Uni course I did on web site design, but nothing in depth, and nothing like DOING things with it, we just talked about using it in web pages.
Its the usual case of ‘its not what you know, its who you know’.
I happen to know a thing called Google.
Enter the power of the internet.
I simply Googled each of the tasks one by one and found PHP code snippets for each step.
Testing each step as I went, I was able to build up the whole program over the space of a few hours.
I was pretty blown away with the power of the internet. Thanks to people smarter than me that took the time to put their knowledge on the web, Google then indexing it for me, I was able to do something that was way past my ability and knowledge to do.
In the old days, it would have been off to the library to get the books to have a go at this.
Perhaps I might have been able to contact someone what was willing to help, or paid a contract programmer to come in and do the do.
Both options would have been expensive and time consuming.
Sure, there was some Googling skills required, and some php hacking skills, but that’s another topic for another blog in the next few days.
Till then, I am just asking you to take a moment and reflect on how the power of the internet really has changed the world and given people new abilities.