I’d like to say a few words about that today.

The companies that I’ve observed typically pay attention matters such as industry backgrounds, years of experience, and so forth. They want to know what types of projects applicants have worked on, which compilers and operating systems they’re familiar with, which communication protocols and software packages they’ve used, and so forth. Many also want to know about employee’s work ethic and personality, but in end, hiring decisions frequently boil down to employee’s work experience and how much training that person would require.

All of those are important, sensible considerations. As I observed these companies though, I noticed that most of them—about 80% or more—paid little or no attention to whether applicant had a clean, readable programming style. They were deeply concerned about whether applicant could get job done, and didn’t seem to care much about whether their software could be easily understood and modified by others, years down road.

To some extent, this is understandable. After all, immediate goal of most companies is to develop working products that they can sell. What many forget, however, is that they are supposed to be marathoners, not sprinters. They need to think more in terms of finishing entire race, and less in terms of achieving short-term victories.

PIM Team Case Study: Creating Text Effects With PHP and GD

Problem A-tec Signs and Sraphics Inc. launched a web site with idea to sell decals online. To achieve better customers ineterest website had to integrate online decal builder. The company is offering also decals for vehicles which brought some specific requirements to builder like having decal text turning arround 4 types of arcs.

Goals - Provide users with preview area - Allow visitors to choose font and color - Allow adding drop shadow and selecting drop shadow color - Allow turning text into arcs - Real Time calculating Solution Because of need for increasing customers interest we had to think about not for perfect math formulas when showing graphs in preview area, but for people who will look at them. As we will reaveal below, there were few problems going arround human appreceptions for something 'perfectly smooth' and matchematical perfect figures. Methodology We were going to extensively use PHP GD library for text effects. It provided easy changing of fonts and colors, adding drop shawdows and rotating texts. We had also to create color palletes which to appear when user click and disappear when color is selected (You can personally try decals creating here). Using hidden layers and javascript was supposed to do work. The main problem in this site was to create 4 types of arcs so when user selects one of them text is created arround imaginary arc (like in vector graphical softwares). We were going to study Bezie's formulas and create these arcs with its help. Implementation PIM Team Bulgaria had task to build full functional online decals builder with following features: - Decal background Some users were supposed to have their decals placed on colored background. We had to allow preview area to be painted in a selected background. First we created image in temp folder: // name of destination image $dest='decals/'.time().'.jpg';

//the background imagefilledrectangle ( $im, 0, 0, 590, 60, $colors[$_POST['bcolors']]); $colors array contains available color which are stored by administrator in database. Thus, when visitor selects a background it is passed as parametter to imagefilledrectangle function. - Font selection Users should be able to select fonts for their future decals. Knowing that we can't consider all fonts will be available on all visitor's computers we had to upload them on web server directory. We allowed admin to manage fonts, adding their names and uploading files in admin area. The fonts in select box came from database. Selected font was passed in call to imagettftext funtion which is drawing on previously created image. - Color Selections The color selections had to be a palettes which appear when user clicks and disappear when color is selected. The palette had to look as a table with colors and these colors are also defined in admin area so they had to come dynamicly. We had to seed a static javascript function with dynamic content. We created a PHP cycle which was taking colors from database and then creating a string for HTML table. This table is then passed to a javascript function which creates palletes with help of hidden layers: function showTable(table) { mouseX = window.event.x + document.body.scrollLeft+25; if(table=='background') { var content=""; var y=460; }