I don’t know how many (Internet development) projects I’ve been on, but it’s quite a lot through the years. One thing happening over and over again is that all the ambitious goals of the project isn’t quite reached before the launch – and something is either cut short or not quite as polished as it should have been. Lately I’ve been wondering weather this is the right approach. Many of the things you leave out when the deadline starts getting closer is “the finishing touch” – this is especially true for back-ends and other invisible details everywhere. Last time I changed this site, I didn’t get to write a back-end for “site maintenance” where all those things driven by databases – figuring I could do it later – and loaded the initially needed data into the database. I did never get on to write the backend – instead I got used to maintaining the database contents from a mysql client and moved on to doing other little projects.

To write efficient Mysql-powered applications a little insight in how Mysql works is needed. One often overlooked example of this is Mysqls silent column changes features, which may cause your tables to look different than you specified. I’m sure most people know, that using chars is generally faster than varchars, but did you know that Mysql may actually change your char-columns to varchars? This happens if you have a variable length column in a table (ie. one varchar and two chars in a table causes all to be converted varchars). You can find more on the automatic column conversions in the Mysql manual.

I’m sure the concept of pointless meetings is familiar - too many people gathered to discuss some issue but after spending hours together no decision has been reached - only the next meeting with a few more people. Here’s one tool which might help a little.

I should begin by noticing that the idea is not my own - it has been as far as I know been used before. I came across it at the Copenhagen Business School where one of the teachers in Organization told about it (and credited it to Søren T. Lyngsøe A/S). The idea is called the meeting clock and it’s quite simple (just as so many excellent ideas are). The clock doesn’t tell time, it shows how much the meeting cost.

Lost history

This site started once upon a time in 1998, but has changed through the years and as I’ve switched CMS systems, servers and played around, the posts from the first few years are lost in history.

This site also used to contain Danish posts, English posts and a mixture of personal and developer related stuff.

From 2010 and on wards I’ve tried to post only in English and keep it to technical/development content, and moved other content in Danish to my site in Danish.