For whom should you vote?
April 6th, 2014
No, I won’t tell you who is the better candidate in the upcoming Quebec elections. I just want to give you some perspective. Are you able to reduce your expenses while at the same time buying a new car and a perfect house? If you had the choice to do that by putting everything on […]
Inappropriate April’s Fools pranks
April 1st, 2014
If you think that someone who is offended at a joke has no sense of humor, I invite you to watch this scene from the movie The Lives of Others. The setting is East Germany, Stasi headquarters. Please watch before you read further. You probably all agree that this prank was cruel. Why? Because the […]
How to kill creativity, part 1
March 31st, 2014
Edit: I recommend reading this article first and then watching the video afterwards. It will make more sense in this order. I first viewed this enlightening lecture on creativity by John Cleese (Monty Python) a few years ago. Since then, I saw an incredible progress in my problem-solving skills and generated countless creative ideas. John […]
Unit Testing by Example @ ConFoo
March 2nd, 2014
I gave a talk last week at ConFoo. It was very well received and I had some amazing feedback. One person told me that he has been trying to write tests for two years but never had any success. With the advice gathered in my talk, he was able to write a few tests and […]
Raise the red flag
January 29th, 2014
All project failures can be prevented. There are countless reasons. Some technical and some non-technical. Some internal and some external. Some we can control and some we cannot. But there is one thing that they all have in common: we can raise the red flag. With enough experience, we can see things coming before it’s […]
Frameworks for everyone
January 8th, 2014
I recently read an article about the ecosystem of PHP frameworks. First, I don’t understand why the author puts Aura and Symfony in different categories. Symfony can be used standalone components or as a full-stack framework. Additional components are very easy to install through Composer. The way to describe the frameworks in that article is […]
What are business goals and why should you care?
December 31st, 2013
Business is for the management, programming is for the programmers, right? Wrong! Many aspects of the business must be understood by the programmer for the success of the project. How can you write a good accounting system if you don’t know a thing about accounting? The days where a programmer simply translated flowcharts into code […]
Software review: The Hit List
December 5th, 2013
If you’re a Mac user and seeking an easy way to manage your to-do list, I strongly recommend The Hit List. Here are some of the feature that I like most. Multitude of shortcuts Start entering a new task by simply hitting Enter on your keyboard. Once you typed the task name, hit Tab to […]
Ever wondered how ConFoo creates the perfect timetable?
October 22nd, 2013
Nobody notices the effort that is put into scheduling so many ConFoo talks. Everyone notices that the conference runs smoothly, is a lot of fun to attend and everyone learns heaps. That is certainly no accident. Let me give you a peek into the scheduling process. Use this timetable as a reference when you read […]
Doctrine: saving you some tables and headaches
October 17th, 2013
I like database schema normalization, but sometimes it just creates too much overhead. For example, you may want to let your users to enter a number of URLs (facebook, linkedin, twitter, blog, company, etc.) The straightforward solution seems to add a Url table with foreign key (user_id=1) to link it to the User. Sometimes you want […]