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Effective Presentation Writing and Delivering
March 25th, 2013
I have been speaking at, attending and organizing conferences for the last 7 years. I have enough to say about this topic to write a book, so I’ll stick with an overview and let you fill in the details with your creativity. This post focuses on presentations in the IT world. Planning is often overlooked, […]
Like Athletes, Developers Need Practice Before Performing
March 22nd, 2013
Developers always learn new things. They read books and blogs. They attend conferences and workshops. They are expected to apply this newfound knowledge in their projects to increase software performance, security and quality. But projects are all about delivery. Where and when can a developer practice theory? This is an often overlooked element. Think of […]
Conference Organizer Tip #1: Advisors
December 21st, 2012
More and more conference organizers reach out to me for advice. My advice is not applicable to all types of events, but hopefully it will help to make the task easier and achieve better results. In the following series, I will explain how we manage to organize an internationally recognized conference (ConFoo) run by a […]
Writing Readable Code
December 14th, 2012
My experience taught me to be verbose and meaningful. I will not talk about code cosmetics. Here are three simple questions. How many times will you write this line of code? How many times will you read that line? How many other people will read it? The answer to the first question is usually “one” […]
Performance & Scalability Are Different Things
November 29th, 2012
I have seen a lot of developers confuse scalability and performance. Some use these terms interchangeably. It is important that we use terms correctly, so that we do not create false expectations for the team or the client, or solve the wrong problems. Scalability The term has become recently popular with the cloud trend. It is […]
Security Questions: Not So Secure
November 28th, 2012
Do you force your users to pick from a list of predefined security questions? Who is my favorite singer? I don’t have one, and even if I did, tastes change over time. What was the name of my first dog? His name was Rex. That was your guess number one anyway. In what hospital was […]
Div Higher Than the Image it Contains
August 2nd, 2012
I came across this simple problem when placing a sole image inside a div: the div always ended up being a few pixels higher than the image. Notice the few blank pixels below the image. After some searching, the solution was applied using CSS: [...]
How to Improve Open Source Software’s Documentation
June 27th, 2012
In my experience, documentation is one of the weakest points of open source software. It’s often incomplete, unstructured and/or outdated. There are never enough examples. When examples are present, they often do not follow best practices for the sake of brevity. Another big issue is to distinguish between software versions, as it is seldom clear […]
Selenium 2: Wrong Browser Launched
June 20th, 2012
I have a test suite with PHPUnit and Selenium. I recently upgraded to Selenium 2 (Selenium WebDriver) and updated my PHP code. I specified explicitly in my code that Firefox should be used but the tests consistently opened Chrome instead. The error did not come from the fact that I incorrectly updated my code. You […]
Deleting From Self-Referencing Tables
May 17th, 2012
Today, I ran into a common issue when deleting records from a table. I was using Doctrine 1.2 on top of MySQL. Deleting a certain number of records failed due to an integrity constraint. Self-Referencing Tables A self-referencing table is one that has a foreign key pointing to the same table. For example, a folder […]