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amoeba to Einstein
Monday, August 25 2008
In my professional, non-hole-digging life, I've been working on building the nuts and bolts of a website that requires a massive integration with a pre-built course management system called Moodle. I've dealt with such large integrations in the past, particularly with a shopping cart application called XCart, so I know the drill. The idea is to learn as little as possible about the integrated product while still getting the damn thing to function. Learning little is the reason you've chosen a product to integrate in the first place; if I really wanted to get to know the insides and outsides of something, I'd build it myself and spare myself the agony of dealing with thousands of lines of dreadful coding practices. I speak, of course, as someone with a very definite view of what makes for æsthetic code. I find deviations from this æsthetic (an inevitability in the code of others) depressing, but there's just no way I can code an educational site from scratch in the timeframe allotted to this particular project's development. So I find myself muddling through page after page of PHP code in various parts of a deeply-nested folder structure. If it weren't for Homesite's global search feature, there would be no way for me to tease out how Moodle works. But if you know how to search (and this is indeed a key to the use of Google), you don't even have to know what you're looking for. All you have to know is something along the way to what you are looking for. A series of searches, each informed by the results of the last, can zero in on something in a way that a singular numbskull search cannot. In this pursuit I have the advantage of someone who actually understands the process of natural selection (biology teachers and flyover-country school board members take note), that it's a long series of filters as opposed to one glorious high-stakes crapshoot with prizes that range from amoeba to Einstein.
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