On Saturday 14 January 2006 08:14 pm, Manfred Riem wrote: <snip></snip> > I know that I would like to know how many fellow LDS developers > are out there and what we could do to help the Church in any way > possible. Wouldn't you? ;) > > Kind regards, > ---- > Manfred Riem
Just my personal opinion, The Church needs skilled developers, most organizations do. The trouble in using new developers is the effort required to train the developers to do things a particular way. Each developer needs skills in multiple languages, operating systems, source code control, source coding standards, APIs, how to work in a group, and the list goes on and on. The training takes time and someone who understands how to do it correctly will need to teach those skills. The teaching takes time away from creating new or better applications. Setting up to use several new developers can be quite a burden. The best one can do right now is to get active in a community and get some good experience. If you are a C coder join a project that is heavy into to real C code. Do more than just read books and wait for something to happen. Become a skilled world class developer. If you don't have a project then find an itch, start a project and scratch. Hopefully someone in the Church will publish their coding standards and best practices so we can each start to become fully trained and ready for when the opportunities come. It is a lot like preparing for missions. The training for new missionaries today begins years prior to the call. There are new aids and standards in place to help and guide those who are preparing so they are ready when their time comes. Training for those 19 year old missionaries (and others) just entering the MTCs began 19+ years ago. Now is the time to prepare. Example - If you don't like the way MLS is today write your own, GPL the code and submit the code for review to the Church. Spend enough time to build a solid foundation and document it very very well ........ OR build a program to assist people to become prepared - build a recipe program (ERP and Inventory control) to build a 1 year supply as an extensions of their everyday meal and money planning. Be sure to conserve users resources, increase the abilities of those preparing meals, meet nutritional needs, and do it with a minimal impact to the user. Do not forget some folks have food allergies ! Of course make the interface easy to use and maintainable. Perhaps a plugin to GNUCash would be a good place to help. When the time comes to help fix MLS you will be ready to share code and your new knowledge and code will not go to waste. I prefer Web interfaces, MySQL, PHP, and linux. Building a solid web program that is secure, fast, small, and supports multiple languages is hard work. Getting the experience to do it quickly takes time and effort. My current project is one to scan paper docs and index the docs for quick retrieval. Building it has been fun but very challenging. After a few hundred hours coding and many hundreds of hours researching how the various interfaces work things are finally starting to work. I still have a long way to go and much to learn. The project is now in use and starting to help a friend with a paper problem. We are working on version 0.4.0. Hopefully 0.4.0 will be ready to release in the next few weeks. PHP, SQL, WWW and others are (finally) becoming friends. Next is learning to tame CVS, rpm/apt/emerge/make, a project editor and version 0.4.1 ! Then on to 0.4.2 . It has been great fun. May God bless your endeavors oscar <snip> _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
