As mentioned in my earlier article, Technical Debt, refactoring your code is very important. It’s the primary method of managing/reducing technical debt, and helps to constantly improve your codebase. However, knowing what to refactor, what to refactor first, and how to refactor code isn’t always obvious. What Is Refactoring? Refactoring is the act of modifying […]
Development
Technical Debt
Technical debt is an issue that all programmers have to deal with at some point in their careers, and more often than not, it’s an ongoing issue. What is technical debt, you ask? When you do something the quick & dirty way, such as patching up a bug without fixing the underlying issue, or prototyping […]
My PHP Router Class
Recently I had some spare time and decided to rewrite the PHP Router I’ve been using on many of my recent projects. I prefer to have my projects setup with .htaccess which redirects all page requests to index.php which uses my router to decide which function to call. This approach allows me to write very […]
PHP 5.4.0 Is Now Available
It’s been an exciting first quarter this year in technology. Apache HTTPD 2.4 was just released (Apache is a very popular web server and this was a significant upgrade), and now PHP 5.4.0 just went live. PHP 5.4.0 is a big upgrade that I am very excited to start using. It includes a feature called […]
My Experience With Bootstrap
If you’re in the web development world, you’ve probably been hearing about Twitter Bootstrap, a new HTML/CSS framework that takes some of the tedium out of setting up a web application. Instead of worrying about creating basic styles for forms, layouts, tables, etc., you can just jump in and start coding your application. For me, […]
FizzBuzz Examples
FizzBuzz is a very popular “test” used when interviewing programmers. It’s mostly used to filter out people who can’t actually program. Now you may wonder why such a test would be necessary, after all, why would somebody who can’t program apply for a programming job? The unfortunate truth is, many people believe they can program […]
Why Bugs Take Forever To Fix
I’ve been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic lately, a new MMO from developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts that I’ve been looking forwards to for a while. It’s a fun game, but there are quite a few bugs, and I’ve noticed a lot of people complaining about bugs: There are too […]
Share users amongst two WordPress sites
If you have two WordPress sites and would like to share users among them, it’s quite easy. Both sites will unfortunately have to use the same database, with different table prefixes (Please note: This can cause issues with poorly written plugins that don’t use the WordPress prefix option). On your first site, in the wp-config.php […]
WordPress 3.1
WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 was just released and I’m already running it on one of my sites. It’s fantastic, they fixed and added quite a few nice things We have the ability to query multiple taxonomies now Custom post types can have archive/index pages (Using the template post-type-archive-{$post_type}.php) The link dialog box lets you search […]
The Value of Project Specifications
Project Specifications and requirements gathering are the foundation upon which a project is built. They are essential, and should never be left out though they often are. In this article, I’ll explain what they are and what makes them so important. Project Specs are documents which detail the features and functionality of a project and […]