I have seend the DVD a thousand times and I still am not tired of it, and I got the soundtrack playing constantly while working.

TechCrunch has a story up about the ins-and-outs of building a web application in three four days with little to no money. These days with open source tools and web-two-point-owe type open APIs and frameworks, it is easy for a dedicated team of developers, designers and PR/marketing people to bring out something that may just be the next hit of the social media world. Guy Kawasaki knows all about this with Truemors and Alltop. The flipside of that coin, however, is that there will be a proliferation of so many social networking/web-two-point-owe type of tools and sites to choose from, it will be hard to distinguish which ones are worth engaging with or signing up for and which ones will just be contributing to social networking fatigue

Already there is a movement in the direction of lifestream aggregators like Friendfeed and planet type services that pull all your scattered web services and networks you belong to into one central space. That is of course the main raison d’etre for this very blog of mine where I can pull everything together under one roof and my own namespace. Of course the process takes time and effort and it becomes yet another modality to manage and nurture and maintain if you wanna establish a credible and/or professional web presence.

Speaking of lifestream and web aggregator services, the South African blogosphere temporarily experienced a little uproar when Justin Hartman, one of the co-founders of Afrigator.com, blogged about a new RSS aggregator service called regator.com that received some press and buzz over at TechCrunch , Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. Justin and the co-founders and many of the SA bloggerati felt there was a possible case of IP infringement since the logo, name and colorscheme is basically identical to the Afrigator.com properties’ own brand assets. A flurry of comments on Justin’s blog was followed by one of the co-founders of Regator.com posting a comment and basically playing very nice and dispelling any fears and suspicions of foul play or malicious intent. It is a play on aggregator, since it is an aggregation RSS service, alligator seemed a natural and fun mascot, alligators are green, and the top level dot com domain name was available, hence regator.com. It all seems to be a major coincidence and case of morphic resonance and Justin has decided to check out the beta version of regator.com just to set his own mind at ease.

Afrigator.com of course is also an example of how a web app can be put together with enough skill, dedication and ingenuity from the right people combined in a good, efficient team. It is a South African made aggregation service where people submit the best blogs from within South Africa and the rest of Africa and the ones with the most buzz around it (algorithm, algorithm) kind of floats to the top a la digg or techmeme. ReadWriteWeb did an excellent round-up and hat tip to local South African web dev skills last November and this very story also featured in yesterdays uproar about the regator copyright infringement case.

Update, July 05, 2008, 07:30 UTC +2: Scott Lockhart, co-founder of regator.com commented on my blog post about the misunderstanding about them infringeing coincidentally using the same mascot, colorscheme and similar sounding domain name as local aggregator service Afrigator.com I appreciate the effort Scott has gone through to do damage control and set minds at ease and convince evceryone involved of their bona fides and that they really were not aware of Afrigator before yesterday. He also pointed me to Justin’s update and that Justin went over and got access to their entire operation to see that intentions were good. Stii, one of the Afrigator.com co-founders, also did a very diplomatic post and put a nice positive twist on the whole saga.

This is an older post from last year November, but still relevant and on-topic, so I will share it here. The post analyzes the qualities of a good programmer, someone who has a real passion for the code and the technology and how it works…

It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

I consider myself to be a pretty good programmer. At the same time, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the business side of the fence, filtering technical CVs for projects, interviewing people, etc. Thanks to this, I think I have a bit of experience in recognising good programmers, and I want to share it in this article, in the hope that it may help other “business guys” to recognise good programmers. And, who knows, perhaps some programmers who have the potential to be good but haven’t really exploited this can also read this and realise what they need to do to become good (although, as I’ll argue, that’s definitely not accessible to all programmers!).