Write a Blogging Engine

Published 23 September 07 by Justin French

From Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine by Abhijit Nadgouda:

What is the best way learning any kind of programming? Write programs! I sincerely believe that a blog engine is one of the rare pieces which employs all the basics of Web programming but can be simple enough to understand.

Couldn’t agree more. This is my favorite conversation point for interviewing web app developers.

• if you have no idea what the problem domain is (if you don’t know enough about blogging), we can cut the interview short, because it’s clear you don’t “get” the internet at the level I was hoping for
• the problem domain is also small enough that you can hold all the pieces in your head
• you can sketch the model on the back of a napkin in a Fitzroy café

Even better, we tend to interview quite a lot of PHP/Java/Python developers who want to work with the Rails framework, but if they can’t talk about the model or implementation, it’s pretty clear to me that they haven’t spent much time looking into it at all. From DHH’s 20-minute-video, through to Mephisto, Simplelog and even Radiant, there’s plenty of resources out there.

“What models would we need for a simple blog?” is almost a freebie, but many stumble.