Category: programming
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Why Too Many External Dependencies Is Detrimental to Your Website
People love the whole idea of mashups with technology in terms of consuming APIs, using plugins or 3rd party widgets. However, as websites scale and grow more complex, depending on these 3rd party dependencies is actually problematic. This blog discusses the issues surrounding the situation.
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Why Developers Need to Start Rejecting New Languages, Tools and Frameworks
The title of this blog post might seem a bit misleading at first but the crux of my argument centers around a huge problem in the development world: the proliferation and sheer abundance of too many languages, tools and frameworks. Part of my frustration as a developer is that the number of these tools (in…
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A Few Myths about Coders/Coding
One of myths about coders/coding I feel has been poorly perpetuated by movies like The Social Network where we simply write code all day and night, non-stop. Perhaps, there are a few people who might enact this but I feel that the average coder does not perform in this manner.
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Tips on Developing A Successful Software Product
While having tea with a friend yesterday, we ended up discussing a mobile application project that he’s been working on. He had been on the project for over a year and in inquiring about the readiness of it, I learned that he needed to do quite a bit more. Part of the issue was that…
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Symfony 2: Why You Should Move Your Logic into a Service
In typical MVC applications, people end up storing business logic into either the controller or the model layer. The problem in this approach is that in either case, you introduce code bloat and dependencies that should not really exist. Controllers, which are essentially the observer pattern, act as a traffic light, taking requests and directing…
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Symfony 2: Annoying Issue with Data Transformers, DateTime, Timezones and PHP.ini
I spent almost the entire day going through the low level code of Symfony 2 trying to determine a really obscure error with my code. The issue started from dealing with using a Time type for one of my columns and having the form validate it appropriately. Unfortunately, the error message that bubbled up did…
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PHP: References, Scoping, Arrays and Function Design
Surprisingly, a lot of PHP code that I see in the industry rarely makes use of the ideas of references. However, references are an exceptionally powerful tool in the programming world because it can mean the difference in terms of memory management and performance. Quite a few people might not grasp some of the basic…
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jQuery: Autocomplete Issue with Select
I found an interesting undocumented consequence when you override the _renderItem function with one of your own. Most people might attempt to follow the format from the code example which shows a line that appends an “<a>” tag to the string (specifically as follows):
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Symfony 2: Many-to-Many Relationships and Form Elements
One of the things I’m developing a love for with Symfony 2 is how Doctrine, forms and Twig work together in a fairly elegant manner. With a little bit of code and annotations, you can allow Symfony 2 to perform a lot of the heavy lifting and boiler plate code that normally is a pain-in-the-rear…
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Just Tried oDesk
A friend of mine was talking about giving oDesk a shot for contracting/freelancing. Since I’m looking for various possibilities in the job market, I thought about trying to contract and decided to fill my profile in. This blog addresses some things as someone who’s primarily worked as a fulltime employee looking at a system like…