[Chicago-talk] Mostly off-topic and blatent self-promotion

Jim Thomason jthomasoniii at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 10 15:45:08 CST 2004


Well, I figured this could be useful to some of you
guys, so I'll pass it along.

http://www.lunchmanager.com/

Finally publically accessible.

So what's the Lunch Manager do? It coordinates lunch
activities. Think of all the times that someone has
popped up and said, "Hey, how about eating at
so-and-so" only to hear that 3 other people faxed in
their order 20 minutes ago and someone's already on
the way to pick it up.

Well no more! Now you can log in to the lunch manager,
propose a lunch activity, and sit back and wait as
people respond to your beautiful suggestion of going
to McDonald's. Then just round 'em up at 11:45 (they
already agreed to go then!) and you're set to go. No
fuss, no muss.

It's all very exciting, perhaps.

Anyway, you may all hit http://www.lunchmanager.com to
sign up and log in.

And now no more complaining if you didn't hear about a
lunch proposal. :-)

It's still a bit rough around the edges, but it hasn't
been used enough to motivate me to add in the more
advanced features that I've got percolating.

To keep this more topical to perl-ish things, I'll let
you all know that the lunch manager is a 100% pure
perl powered site running on linux w/a mysql backend.
Total development time is hovering right around 8
hours or so for everything on there, largely due to my
applications framework on the backend.

To extoll a bit of philosophy here, I highly highly
highly recommend doing development in an environment
sitting on top of a framework of some sort, whatever
it may be. Simply, a good framework allows you to
worry about building your actual application instead
of all of the nitty gritty details that you shouldn't
need to worry about. Things like accessors, mutators,
loading objects from the database, committing back to
the database, grouping objects, permissions, etc. If
you're spending your time re-inventing those wheels,
you're not spending it on actually developing your
application and you're slowing yourself down.

(yes, yes, I'm quite well known as a wheel re-inventer
myself. The framework I use is completely homemade,
after all)

Suggestions or feedback on the lunch manager would be
appreciated, but should probably be moved off list.
Design philosophy discussion may naturally continue,
though. :)

-Jim.....

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html



More information about the Chicago-talk mailing list