Ship it
Posted by jeggent on February 22, 2013
In his manifesto How To Be Legendary author Johnny B. Truant gives “The surefire formula to become Legendary”. Step 2 is simply “Ship”. At least for me, when I don’t have a specific deadline, this can be the most challenging step. When is something totally done? Could it ever be truly perfect?
Well I’ve taken Johnny’s advice/instruction to heart and shipped my first PHP programming project. I’ve written a Section 089000 3-Part Louver Specification Writer. This was a really interesting project for me. I used some CSS for expanding and collapsing sections that I’d never used before, of course the application is written in PHP which is still new to me, and it outputs a file in Rich Text Format (.rtf). The syntax of the RTF file may have ended up being the most challenging part.
Just to give you an idea, here is a selection of the RTF file code:
\pard{\*\pn\pnlvlbody\pnf1\pnindent0\pnstart1\pnucltr{\pntxta.}}
This web application may not be terribly interesting if you aren’t an architect needing to specify a louver. However I still think it’s kind of cool. The application builds the correctly formatted text based on the options selected then outputs that text in RTF.
I’m sure I could have spent several more weeks adding more features and tweaks. But I’m glad that decided to ship this web application and will be able to start on another project.