This past week I stumbled upon a nice tool: sloccount. Sloccount was written by David Wheeler and is a set of tools to count lines of code. Wheeler also has some really interesting papers regarding the linux kernel size and its development cost.
After installing sloccount* I immediately started to harvest data on all projects I currently have on my hard drive. I was really impressed by the first results. The costs are too high, I thought. A small project with 2,000 lines of PHP code like the Autoresponder has a development cost estimated at more than US$55k.
After reading sloccount’s user manual and pondering about the Awake Autoresponder I started to change my mind. 2k lines of PHP code encompass a lot more work than the number suggests. A few reasons for this:
- The code was updated every time a customer submitted a bug. As you know, fixing a bug does not necessarily imply more lines of code
- Out of the box sloccount doesn’t compute HTML, CSS or Javascript
- Technical support
- Documentation
It took me a few thousand commits, I don’t know how many emails and several hours of night debugging the script on customer’s servers to reach 2k working lines of code. It may sound like cheap advertisement or self promotion but I must say that US$49.90 for the script is a bargain!
* if you are running Ubuntu it’s easy as
sudo apt-get install sloccount
I’m writing this time to announce a minor release of the Awake Autoresponder. Version 1.4.0 is now available. Update is free for all 1.3.x customers. This release contains some small bug fixes + one new feature. It is now possible to be emailed when a new Lead subscribes to the Autoresponder.
As noted in a previous post, version 2.0 is now in the main branch of development. The first phase is almost complete and the script is now using CakePHP as a framework. New features will be added in phase 2 
Awake Autoresponder version 1.3.4 released. This is a micro release with some small bugs fixed. Next version is on the trunk right now. It is going to be a major release since I’m rewriting a lot of code and compability is broken.
I’m also making some experiments with some 3rd-party libraries and even frameworks like CakePHP and Rails. Having a good time
It is time to celebrate. Awake Autoresponder version 1.3.3 is ready! Some minor adjustments have been made including a better leads list visualization, which was a request from most users.
I also took some time to improve my bash programming skills. I wrote a few scripts to build the final product in a zip file. Shipping has never been easier.
http://awakeautoresponder.com
Just launched the Awake Autoresponder website. The address is:
http://awakeautoresponder.com.
I needed something simple that I could hack later. I’m playing with Rails and Ruby a lot and that is why I decided for CakePHP as a framework for the autoresponder website. One server language is enough mess for a project. So let’s just keep PHP in this domain.
Seems that CakePHP and Rails share the same philosophy. Good bet because I never tried CakePHP before but could have it up and running with the main webpage in less than 15 min in the production server.
I’m also trying the YUI CSS files. Seems nice although there is a small bug with IE6 for the columns width. If you are using IE6 you have been warned.
Did not add any JS library yet but I’m sure I’ll be working with JQuery. Awesome.
This past week I stumbled upon a nice tool: sloccount. Sloccount was written by David Wheeler and is a set of tools to count lines of code. Wheeler also has some really interesting papers regarding the linux kernel size and its development cost.
