Category: best-practices
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Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse
April 2nd I made this undiplomatic statement (funny how Twitter practically encourages being provocative): #ZF 2.0 is a great example of second-system syndrome. Matthew Weier O’Phinney and I have a good working relationship. I think his work on the Zend Framework project has been amazing, both from a technology perspective and a marketing perspective. So when…
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Announcing Awk on Rails
Awk on Rails is a new kind of web application development framework, with a distinction that no other framework has: Awk on Rails is fully POSIX compliant. Awk on Rails brings the best practices of modern web application development to the ALAS stack (Apache, Linux, Awk, Shell). This stack is entirely new to the field…
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Quantity Over Quality
Alex Netkachov recently reported a list of micro-optimizations for PHP. Several other bloggers (Sebastian, Maggie, Pádraic) responded with appropriate messages, reminding people that proper application design usually counts more than micro-optimizations. They are all correct. When I was an intern, I emailed a C compiler developer, to ask a question that had occurred to me…
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Accepting a job that failed The Joel Test
A user recently asked: I’m about to accept a job offer for a company that has failed The Joel Test with flying colors. Now, my question is how do I improve the conditions there. I am positive that within a few months I will be able to make a difference. But where do I start?…
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Unit Test Coverage
S.Lott writes in his blog about unit test code-coverage: how much is enough? Effective tests should account not only for code paths, but also input values and other application state or external environment that may affect the behavior. For example, it may be easy to get 100% code coverage from tests for a function like…
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Understanding Unfamiliar Databases
A user recently asked: What kind of approaches and techniques can you employ to become familiar with an existing database if you are tasked with supporting and/or modifying it? How can you easily and effectively ramp up your knowledge of a database you have never seen before? Here was my reply: The first thing I…
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Verifying a Company Uses Best Practices
A user recently asked how to use the Joel Test in an interview, to confirm that a software company practices what they preach with regard to professional software development habits: I’ve got an interview with a company that claims to score a 12 on the Joel Test. […] What are some ways of determining if…
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Do I really need version control?
A user recently asked: I read all over the internet (various sites and blogs) about version control. How great it is and how all developer NEED to use it because is a god bless. Here is the question: do I really need this? … I usually work alone (freelancer) and I had no client that…