Estimates can be one of the hardest things to create as a developer. The word estimate is a misnomer in our industry. It’s almost as if they should be called “agreements” or “promises” according to some bosses. Yet we all know that they are just that: an estimate of the amount of time, not a guarantee. (more…)

Just a little fun for today… (more…)

In part 1, I discussed the various arguments I run into about wanting to be overly security conscious with our sites in regard to third party javascript. In this entry, we’ll run through a few scenarios. (more…)

I have the argument a lot with product managers about allowing custom HTML and Javascript into our projects. I don’t want to do it. I want to only put in predefined, sanitized information. But more about my reasons after this… let’s look at the arguments I get first… (more…)

I use Chrome almost exclusively now. One thing that drove me nuts was the lack of support for FirePHP in the console of Chrome. Google even released some extensions for it - but they either didn’t work or were out of date. So I created my own. (more…)

After transitioning away from the doomed Google Reader to Feedly, I found it to be awesome! I only had one gripe with the shortcut key scenario… when you went to view the entire article in a new tab, it was always focused. This meant I’d still have to middle click with my mouse to put my tabs in the background. (more…)

When doing a bit of code review, I saw an incredibly ornately architected future-proof module written by one of my programmers on my team. It had taken him roughly 3x as long as I had estimated, but the code was very complete. It was created in such a way that every single portion of it was modular and could be interchanged quite easily. (more…)

Just finished a talk at the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association and wanted to share the info. This particular talk was an introduction to PHP. (more…)

This means that: how to translate between PHP and System-i lingo. (more…)

In a break from my normal type of tutorial, I just want to give a real quick overview and highlight of a fictitious “case study” to demonstrate the importance of load testing your application with apache’s ab tool. (more…)