Technical stuff » Resources

Checklist for the Agile Manager

Georgiana — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:26:37 +0000

To be a leader is not the next step for managers. It is the manager’s job to leave room to leaders.

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jurgen Appelo.

The PHP code conventions I use

Georgiana — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:42:57 +0000


aProperties as $sProperty ) {
        if( 'price' === $sProperty ) {  // use === as often as possible; put the string first for speed reasons
            return( true );
        } // .. if
    }
    return( false );
} // END func hasPrices()

/*
 * echo tag
 */

define (CR, "\n");

echo 

	CR, 'Line1
',

	CR, 'Line2
',

	CR, 'Line3
'
;

/**************************************************************
 * Spacing convention
 **************************************************************/

// Code like this:

$sText = 'Time flies like an arrow.';
$sText .= ' Fruit flies like bananas.';

// Should be done in one statement instead of two:

$sText =
    'Time flies like an arrow.' .
    ' Fruit flies like bananas.'
;

?>

PHP on Hormones: Rasmus Lerdorf talk

Georgiana — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:26:09 +0000

Rasmus Lerdorf from Yahoo! talks at MySQL Conference & Expo 2007. Starts with the beginning of PHP and continues to more advances stuff.

Make sure you have the slides handy, too.

Spaghetti code, otherwise known as Drupal.

Writing code is an art, not a simple day-job

Georgiana — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:09:57 +0000

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Gerald Weinberg

Copy and paste is a design error.

David Parnas

Think about how you develop your own code.

Do you rush into writing a piece of code and use comments later, if you have any time left? Or do you use a pseudocode approach by writing comments n the first place and then developing functionality to implement that?

Do you develop code in such a way that it can be later tested and mainained? Or do you write it, prove “it works” and think about it next time you have to adjust functionality?

Do you favor speed for maintainability?

These are the lessons one learns while reading Code Complete, a book which aims to learn you how to do stuff right, not “just do it”. I like it more and more while I’m reading it. Most of the examples present common-sense development, yet I’ve seen so much poor code which does the job that I would like to reccommend it to all software developers. If you do read it, I can only promise it’ll make you a better colleague than you already might be.

JavaScript for PHP developers

Georgiana — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:54:42 +0000

If you’re a PHP developer and you find it difficult to get used to all the insides of JavaScript, I think you need to take a look at PHP.JS. It’s a brilliant tool initially developed by Kevin van Zonneveld, and which aims to port most of the usual PHP functions into equivalent JavaScript ones.

There are two ways of using this excellent codebase:

grab all the available PHP.JS functions and use them as you need them
take each function you really need and put it into your JS codebase for the project

The advantage of the second method is that you don’t have code you don’t need included all over the place, but it also means you will search each time the codebase to discover the code you need. Meanwhile, the first solution seems appropriate for the ones in a hurry, you just try to use one function like you’re accustomed in PHP and it’s there already included, you’re developing fast and safe, with just a small performance issue you can always address later.

Let’s say you’ve using the long2ip and ip2long PHP functions for storing IPs as numbers, and have a strong preference for using them for performance reasons, as all your IPs are stored as numbers in the database. What if you need similar functionality in JavaScript? Well, just take the code you need and use it! It’s that simple

Collaborative online task tracker – free

Georgiana — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:39:16 +0000

Every project, be it small, medium or large, needs tracking down its status and pieces of work / research. A team of people will bring the project to completion, so even if the team has only one member, a way of tracking down its status and work left is extremely important for having always a quick and accurate overview.

For managing small projects, I have found a nice collaborative task tracker with minimal features. It allows for setting up projects, creating tasks, distributing them and tracking them down for completion.

How to be a programmer

Georgiana — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:22:08 +0000

A good book on what it means to be a programmer and how you cand improve your abilities.