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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 […]
I don’t judge a speaker by their GitHub profile
October 3rd, 2013
In case you were wondering what I’m thinking, here is my personal opinion regarding people who provide their GitHub profile as a reference when applying for a speaking opportunity. A GitHub profile is completely irrelevant to me. Why? Because being a good coder does not make one a good speaker. These are two completely different […]
What is Project Rescue?
September 13th, 2013
I noticed that very few people around me understand what project rescue means. Developers usually see this as working very hard to meet deadlines. This is somewhat true, but it’s much more than that. When does a project need rescuing? Most projects go off-track in one way or another. Some are easy to fix due […]
Codes of Conduct at events
August 21st, 2013
There are various incidents being reported at tech conferences, such as harassment and distasteful comments. Attendees want to feel safer, so conferences publish Codes of Conduct. That’s fine, but do jerks really read them? A CoC (code of conduct) at a conference didn’t prevent a sponsor from bashing on a competing programming language during a […]
jQuery Mobile combined with other frameworks
August 18th, 2013
A few interesting questions came up during my presentation at Northeast PHP yesterday. People wanted to know whether jQuery Mobile could be mixed with MVC frameworks such as Backbone or with responsive frameworks such as Bootstrap. Before you go out trying to mix jQuery Mobile with everything else, try to remember why you chose this […]
There’s more to startups than unicorns
August 15th, 2013
I recently read an article in which the author shares some of the annoying things that the IT startup world is spreading. I am also annoyed by the unrealistically pretty picture that people like to paint. You go in, you do fun stuff, you make all the decisions, you make millions, you become famous, etc. […]
Searching by association’s index in Doctrine 2
August 6th, 2013
I stumbled upon quite an interesting problem in Doctrine 2 with ManyToOne associations. Consider this entity: […]