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Agile - What's in it for me?
Often the term Agile means so many things to so many different people. Business people can think it means that the developers want to "wing it" without any formal planning. Developers can think that it means the business wants them to be constantly at their beckon call, dropping work to create their "latest urgent job" and doing more work with less people. The truth of the matter is that this is slightly true to a certain point. It may sound to all the agile experts out there that I've been drinking or I don't really understand agile development or project management - trust me, I really grok agile and love living the agile way. My thoughts will become clear.
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4 Reasons Why Ruby Syntax Is Better Than PHP's
Having been a Rails developer for a little over a year now and after completing a few Rails projects successfully, I thought I'd post a set of reasons why I think Ruby has a cleaner syntax than PHP. The worst part of this for me is that PHP can fix a lot of these things and have a much nicer syntax but in the interests of backwards-compatibility are fairly tied to the current syntax.
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Design Patterns vs Agile Development
I don't think there can be a professional developer out there that isn't aware of the term 'Design Patterns'. Put simply these are standard solutions to common program architecture problems that have stood the test of time and have been abstracted to the point of being applicable to a number of different domains without needing simplification first. They are often overused at the start of a project, building in flexibility for potential future requirements. One of the corner "Patterns" of Agile Development is YAGNI - You Ain't Gonna Need It. With Agile Development being "The One True Way" of developing Web Applications, are the two mutually exclusive?
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Developing components considered bad form in Rails
On a typical modern website, most pages are dynamically generated from various database tables. There is normally the main content area which contains content such as the latest news stories. Then there are usually various boxes in a side bar such as the latest pictures from the galleries which contains the latest content in various other tables. How those boxes are developed differs in best practices between Rails and Symfony...
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Rebuilding a site from Symfony to Rails
After building my personal site from scratch in Symfony/PHP5 - I decided as I am leaning towards Rails now it was time to rewrite it in Rails. I had some good experiences during the process and overall I'm pleased with it. This may serve as a useful push if you're currently a PHP developer tempted by Rails.
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A Video Every Teenage Girl Should Be Made To Watch
In 2006, a young girl named Dallas Jessup made a movie called Just Yell Fire with the support of her local community and her Philipino Street Fighting coach Chad Von Dette. This movie has been released free of charge on the internet and can either be downloaded as a normal PC/Mac playable movie or as a DVD image for burning to a DVD and showing on TVs in school.
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Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment
As a contractor it is always wise to stay on top of upcoming technologies, today's niche market may be tomorrow's big earner. This year I decided to learn Ruby on Rails, so I thought I'd write a post on why I think Rails is such as excellent development system.
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Be careful choosing a domain name for your site
Be very careful how you choose your domain name. A friend at work forwarded this content and it shows some of the pitfalls of innocent sounding names.
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Sharing music, pictures and videos between a Mac and an Xbox 360/Playstation 3
After getting our new 20" iMac, we've completely dropped using Windows at home. With an upcoming party this weekend the question pops up "How will we access our music from the computer?". Nullriver to the rescue!
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Visiting our New Puppy
We went to visit our puppy today and the kids had a great time playing with eight 6-week old labrador puppies.
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