The Archives / Programming

There are 35 posts in the Programming archive.

• Reducing comments and increasing documentation

  When I first started programming, my only goal was to get things to work. Now that I've gone past how to get things to work, I've reached a new point in development: maintaining… Read More

• Scaling is for nerds

  One of the most interesting bits of information from SXSW for me was a small conversation I had while walking to Dinner with Jakob Heuser from… Read More

• Refining your estimation skills

  One of the most important traits that separates junior level developers from senior level developers is the ability to accurately estimate projects. Every junior level developer… Read More

• Long running tasks in Rails: Backgroundrb

  A few months ago, I was looking for a solution to long running tasks in Rails. A long running task is basically just a process that can detach from the main application. Let’s… Read More

• A Language a Year

  This is a tip for all you designers / models developers that want to become better coders. HTML and CSS is one thing, but if you really want to clean… Read More

• Custom page titles and more with Rails

  Here's a quick tip to get custom page titles and more with Rails. From the view. Like it should be. The key to how this all works out in the end is how Rails' templates are rendered.… Read More

• Hacking Markdown: Classes on the <code> element

  For the redesign of my site, I decided I wanted some sexy code-highlighting. For a number of reasons I rejected most PHP-based solutions, the driving reason being accessibility… Read More

• Truncate with fashion

  One of my biggest pet peeves is lazy-truncating around the web. With a couple of lines of PHP and a little bit of substr love, you can cut down long sentences to a… Read More

• Profiling your web application - the home-brew version

  Have you ever wondered what the slowest part of your application was? Ever wished you could know that before you ship it off? I decided last night to take a crack at it for the… Read More

• Revisiting Flex

  A while ago I hinted that I was taking a second-glance at this whole web-publishing business and trying out Read More

• Code bounties

  Something interesting is happening in the open source community -- at least something I've hadn't noticed until recently. The idea is code bounties -- put up a reward fee for specific… Read More

• The train that Web 2.0 Missed : Part 2 of 3

  This portion of my little mini-series is going to describe how students are expected to register at Cal Poly. The aim is to merely expose the blatantly… Read More

• The train that Web 2.0 missed: Part 1 of 3

  With all the craze of Web 2.0 and user-centric web applications that bring together user-generated content and community, there's a major niche that application developers have missed… Read More

• The state of the web: August 2006

  All words and thoughts in the proceeding article come out of my own nonsense brain and are probably more wild speculation than truth. Take what you read with a grain of salt

  I've… Read More

• Better living through DOM builders

  I've been working pretty heavily with JavaScript these past few weeks -- specifically parsing XML & JSON. I found out pretty early on that while modifying the DOM with… Read More

• Zig Version: The missing Subversion GUI for OSX

  Over the past year and a half I've grown to love Subversion. My first experience with Subversion was with TortoiseSVN (you can read about… Read More

• Testing HTML Emailers

  Recently I had a need to send out HTML Emails for testing without the aid of a email management app (as I've done in the past). As I stared at Outlook for far too long, I found… Read More

• Closet developers

  I get a fair number of people asking me "how do I do that?" -- referring to web design, of course. Many of them are envious (usually after they find out my salary), but don't realize… Read More

• Rails Day is coming, Rails Day is coming!

  If there's one time of year that I get really excited about programming, it's Rails Day. Last year's Rails Day was my first immersion into… Read More

• Prototype is a Javascript framework

  This will be a quick post, but I've noticed an ever-increasing trend around the 'net. I've been seeing more and more of these types of comments...

• Beauty in less code

  Tonight I added new features to Poetry with meaning (on my local machine) -- but I actually reduced the total lines of code in… Read More

• Foot in mouth

  Sometimes we put our feet in our mouth. It sucks, but it happens every once in a while. I do it myself, but there are things you can do to prevent this. I realized this today while… Read More

• AJAX Tamed: Where HTML and the DOM meet

  AJAX is a powerful technology and frameworks like Prototype and Dojo have made it frighteningly easy… Read More

• Setting up Subversion with Dreamhost and Windows

  Subversion is an immensely useful tool, especially for the practicing web developer. Think of it as the backups you never created: after setting up your project in Subversion, you… Read More

• PHP 5.1.1 + Markdown and WordPress = Kaboom!

  So, I log onto my site tonight after noticing it was down for about five minutes to find my entire site has exploded with all sorts of errors resembling this:

  Warning:… Read More

• What I want from an analytics package

  So, this past weekend I decided to splurge and buy Mint, mostly just to see what all the hype was about. Honestly, I think I still like Measuremap… Read More

• Are you a Rails developer on the inside?

  Rails has been a large influence on my life in the past year. I know it sounds strange to say such a thing, but I'm serious. Rails has taught… Read More

• Useful PHP coding tips for writing maintainable code

  It's funny, but the best thing that ever happened to my PHP coding was to play with Rails. I've learned a great deal from the framework, and… Read More

• Getting all of your feed subscribers to FeedBurner (Wordpress)

  Are you looking for how to redirect all of your subscribers to FeedBurner in WordPress? Did you find out that you have a large portion of people still subscribed to wp-rss2.php… Read More

• Sitepoint makes me laugh

  Forget if Ruby on Rails can scale - we've got far bigger things to worry about. The question on everyone's mind: Can MVC Scale?

  Read More

• Backpack is slowing down

  Has anyone else noticed lately that Backpack is slowing down? I sure have noticed it. Pages used to load in less than a second, and now it's… Read More

• Why I love the Rails Community

  Because they take a good idea, show how to build in less than four days, and then release it as open-source.

• When programmers attack: Giving the wrong people control of the UI

  There has been much discussion in the rails community about script.aculo.us and whether the full library of effects should be included into the… Read More

• What exactly “enterprise software” really is

  If you're familiar with the web and the business surrounding it, I'm sure you've heard of the term "enterprise software." Sure, it's easy to say and to boast, but seriously what… Read More

• Developers, Meet XHTML. XHTML, Meet Developers.

  Now that we're all introduced, hopefully we can become friends. Maybe it's me, but I've noticed that web developers seem to have this aversion towards XHTML and using web standards.… Read More