A few days (ok, a bunch of days) ago, someone asked me on twitter what I look for when I do a code review. Pretty certain I was tweeting that I was either… a) doing a code review or b) annoyed at doing a code review. heh. I thought for a bit, and I think I’ve distilled the list of things I look for. Now, mind you, I don’t set out with my checkbox list... (more…)

One thing I’m really passionate about is using PHP in enterprise situations. I obviously care about Design Patterns in PHP. I’ve also done a lot of technical review of other books about refactoring away from bad code. (more…)

One debate that the guys on my team have been having revolves around the combination of Javascript and CSS files. There are two schools of thought. The keep them separate and the BFF - Big Fun File system. There are pro’s and cons to both… but as with everything, one particular way may not always be the best - we don’t always have to stay in extremes-land. Here are some thoughts. Feel free to weigh... (more…)

I tend to want to use PHP Exceptions when I can. But, I don’t just leave them as is. I tend to have a large custom exception library. These exceptions extend the base Exception class in PHP - that’s about it. (more…)

So one of the things that really bothered me about the Zend ACL implementation in 1.x was the inherits() method. It simply would test to see if the current role inherited the roles you were testing against. Well, what if the role WAS the tested role? Then it would fail. So, to fix that, in my own Application_Model_Acl implementation, I wrote inheritsIncluding(). (more…)

Do it. Catch your breath. Sit in one spot. Don’t reach for your phone. Look at the sky. Clear your mind. (more…)

I remember a scene from A night at the roxbury where the less-than-slick brothers take some girls back to their room and have a problem closing the deal. One of them keeps saying pickup lines while he has the girl sitting on his bed. She basically says OK - we’re past this. He just can’t seem to close the deal - no matter how much she wants him to. (more…)

Idea: TrackThings.com. This website is made to track sales people and distribution of promotional materials. It was initially thought of as a way to track on-the-ground sales distribution. For example, if you had someone go to three businesses on one street, they could easily track where they went, and mark the interest for followup. (more…)

This idea is to create an idea repository. I started out wanting to make this website - and instead just decided to list my ideas on this blog. But, here goes. (more…)

By default, the labels of form elements in Zend Form are escaped. Sometimes, like in check mark boxes for Terms of Use, it makes sense to add some HTML to this. You can turn off escaping - but just be careful! (more…)