robhudson: If echoing html with escaped quotes is what drove you to use a template system in PHP, I can't help but be concerned. There are certainly better ways to use PHP than to echo out a lot of html and escape all those quotes. Breaking out of PHP for moderate sized blocks, echoing with single quotes and using concatenation for shorter blocks, using template files (Not to be confused with template systems. Template flles that fill themselves in when you provide them with an array, for example). The use of template systems in PHP comes up on #php on OPN now and then, and I just find the whole idea redundant, in that I'm yet to see a template system actually save somebody a noteworthy amount of time in the long run.. Anyway, that's my rant on that topic.
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Bram's bad habits article was interesting. The last point was where I got to thinking about my project manager, who isn't a dumb manager. Looking back over how much crap the project itself dealt me, I wonder if I would've stuck around (The company is more or less a dot com) if he was a dumb manager.
He's not a dumb manager for a couple reasons. First, he's not a developer. He knows he's not a developer, and he doesn't aspire to pose as one. This defines our relationship well. He's also an english major, so he's no idiot. I don't have to speak to him like a child who only understands buzzwords and marketspeak. And lastly, I do keep him up on my progress. It works out. When we scoped the project, I gave him realistic and frank estimates of the work involved and how difficult or boring it may be. He takes that and presents the client with a completion date that's been padded a bit, and time added for QA to do their thing. If only QA didn't suck as much as they do, but that's a rant for a later date. I feel fortunate to have a project manager who I don't feel compelled to avoid or shut out of the development cycle, even if the clients have been nothing but a headache about feature creep and the client's corporate parent office can't properly manage their nationwide servers (Which I swear is a conspiracy to make my life harder).
Oh well, it's not like I plan on keeping this job for much longer. It's a dot com, it's transitory. Time to figure out what a good choice for a college degree is. You know, one that won't be a complete waste of four years. Now if only there were better options out there.