Code should be simple. Code should be butt simple. Code should be so simple that there’s no way it can be misunderstood. Good code has no nooks. Good code has no crannies. Good code is a round room with no corners for bugs to hide in.

We all know this. So why does most code suck?

Because it’s written by people who don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve.

After switching over to Lion, I had to re-enable personal sites to continue working on a side project. Fortunately, it’s just as easy in Lion as it was in Snow Leopard. I’ll walk through the setup process in this article. Note that you’ll need administrator access for a few steps in the process, so you’ll need the admin password.

In Snow Leopard, the quickest and easiest way to get sites set up was to use the “Web Sharing” feature of the OS, and it looks like Lion works the same way.

Last night I was working on a project codenamed Jugatinus, and I needed to slugify some author names. Rather than write a Java program (ugh, work) or define a custom PostgreSQL function to do it (booooring), I stubbornly cowboyed it up and just used a regular old SQL update. It ended up looking like this:

    UPDATE
        author
    SET
        slug=regexp_replace(trim(regexp_replace(lower(name), '[^0-9a-z]+', ' ', 'g')), '[ ]+', '-', 'g');

Eventually, every programmer blogs about how to become a better programmer. It seems to be the price of admission to the industry. Programmers are a vain lot, and every one of us likes to think he has a unique viewpoint to contribute with insightful advice and meaningful guidance. The reality is that the “learn how to program” post is cliché. There are so many that each new one is nothing more than an echo of some old, vaguely-remembered, proto-learn-how-to-program-post. No one should write another. There’s no point.

So obviously I’m going to write another.

Programming is exactly like this.

WCG recently turned 10 years old, and it’s gone through incredible changes over that time. And even though I’ve only been with WCG since August 2010, in those 18 months I’ve seen my little part of the business, the Analytics team, turn completely upside down. It’s moved 3 times, seen both clients and colleagues come and go, seen weddings, and welcomed children into the world. And I’ve got to say, we’ve got some pretty great digs now:

Go Ahead, Pardner.

As it’s grown from a small handful of incredibly talented people to a team of almost 40, the work has changed, too. Looking back, we’ve come through two, and we’re just starting a third.

I ran into Incredibox a few years ago and thought it was cool then, and I just ran into it again on Reddit this morning. It’s gotten a huge upgrade, and now it’s officially awesome.

This is what a French rapper looks like.

Today I migrated to a new work laptop. Always exciting, especially when you’re also upgrading to a new OS version. In this case, I moved from Snow Leopard to Lion.

Yes, I actually was excited.

Shut up.

In addition to being excited, I was also prepared for a royally painful migration, since every migration I’ve ever done was royally painful. However, I’m happy to report that in this case, it was (almost) dead simple. As simple as it should always have been.

My friend Sabrina forwarded me a ridiculously awesome sneak-peek video of a dance she and the Broadway class she’s in will be performing at the Broadway in May show Ballet Austin’s putting on May 1 and 2.

The dance was performed flash-mob style at the Art City Austin festival that was happening downtown last weekend. The whole class showed up dressed casually, congregated in front of City Hall, and when the music for the number came on, they just started dancing. The effect was perfect:

One of my goals for SIGPWNED has always been that it would be a place where I could share not only my ideas and my writing, but also my work. And so today I announce a new section of my site, the Projects section, as well as my first open source project ever: Jsonification.

The projects page will be where I keep a laundry list of all of my most current projects and where they stand at the moment. Right now, I’ve got WhatsTwending there, as well as the new project I’m announcing in this post.

Jsonification has its own project page, so I’ll let you head over there to read all about it. I’ll just mention the high points here, as paraphrased from the project page: