I came across a site today and my old days of coding flashed back at me. I remembered when I had to take care of so many things myself with my codes. Then validation was a bitch. It nearly killed me because I had to think of so many things to put in perspective and the lines of code I had to manage to get it done. Thinking of possible SQL injection, Cross Site Request Forgery and other little vulnerabilities would make you sigh and roll up your sleeves. I am not talking about the User Interface(UI). UI is UI and I have my opinion about this. 

Meanwhile, I was just wandering on Facebook, then stumbled on someone that I have a mutual friend with (though not a friend). Something got me attracted to her profile and I checked her timeline. I saw a link that looked more like a Naija based application. I opened the application on my browser and I liked what I saw. The colour was subtle and the site was peaceful. Everything seemed cool until I decided to do my regular test on Naija sites (forgive me if this got you annoyed).

I clicked on the registration page and input the following data as a first time user.

Guess what? It accepted it and took me to the verification page. I quickly verified my email and signed into the application but Alas! the following screenshots were what I got.

I understand the developer and I can't but relate with when I used to do such things. I know it is costly to validate all the data but there are enough tools out there that would take care of the validation out of the box.

Thinking of my days at Pay4Me, while I was employed as a young developer and I was so full of vigour and strength to make things happen. I was saddle with the responsibility of developing an application for Nigerian airlines. I setup the project, then set out for my vanilla coding. I did quite well, in three days I was able to disprove the Indians that said the project could not be developed in a week. I did a fantastic job in 3 days that was fit for demo and was applauded by all and sundry. I was very exicted. But there was a big challenge, my application was to be tested by the same Indians. There and then, I knew there was a problem in the making. They tested my application and sent me bugs and errors of almost 50 excel spreadsheet rows. I was so confused. I also replicated their steps and saw my flaws. To cut the very long story short, my application wasn't approved to be fit for launch.

I latter tried everything on the application that they built in place of the one that I did and realised that they already took care of all the mess. I did my research and found out that they used something called a framework. I researched more and saw myself lagging behind in the trend of best practices.

Now, I'm sure that you would understand why I advocate best practices and would want all developers, not only Nigerian developers to see this as important. I hear and meet developers everyday who say they like and want to stick to their vanilla way of coding. "I don't like whatever that makes me lazy" is what they say. I understand that there is nothing bad about doing what you are doing but what you would get frome your vanilla coding is what I have just tried out on this innocent site or something that would have you on your toes and won't allow you to sleep due to constant threat. I am not saying that all the applications I have developed with framework are hack-proof, but you can't get away with what I did on the site above while testing any of my applications.

Please let's embrace good development practices; research about how best things are being done in your development environment and always seek to know why.

Movement!