Category Archives: programming

Larry Wall once said that the three virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. This saying has become legendary tidbit of software development humor. And as all good jokes, this one is funny because it is mostly true. … Continue reading →

If you are still using HTML4 for your new websites you should stop probably stop. And I’m not saying this because of standards compliance, or some sort of web snobbery. I’m saying this because it is a pragmatic thing to … Continue reading →

When I was building my Makdown Journal app I have noticed that there were no good tutorials showing you how to use the official Dropbox-SDK Gem with the Sinatra framework. Granted, this is not necessarily an issue if you know … Continue reading →

A while ago I wrote about my search for a good private journaling solution. Since then I have tried dozens of different apps and services without finding anything I would like. At one point I even wrote my own little … Continue reading →

Whenever you are working on a programming project, chances are that there is some sort of tedious manual thing you are going to be doing in order to compile it or prep it for release. Compiling the project is usually … Continue reading →

Most seasoned programmers are keenly aware of the way different platforms encode line endings in text files. Novice coders and non-technical folk however are often taken completely by surprise by it. In a layman’s world the problem of line termination … Continue reading →

Whenever you sit down to create a new website (or a web project), there is usually a litany of things you need to do before you can start hacking. And I don’t include brewing a strong cup of coffee in … Continue reading →

Here is something you may or may not know: people judge you based on the domain name associated with your email. Not all people, mind you – just some. I do for example, which should be more than enough reason … Continue reading →

As I mentioned in the previous installment, I want to use Sixex four our new issue management tools. Why? Because it is easy to work with, lean, powerful and very testable. My composer.json file at the moment looks like this: … Continue reading →

Having created a really simple Pastebin, how about we embark on something more ambitious. An actual web app with all the usual trappings: user accounts, session management, email notifications and etc. On the other hand, I shouldn’t try to build … Continue reading →

In Part 4, I mentioned the Codeception test framework, but didn’t really get to use it because their page temporarily went down and I didn’t feel like trying to hunt down the documentation from third party sources. That outage seemed … Continue reading →

In the previous installment we built a semi-working skeleton of our application. It is time to finally get down to the business and make it talk to the database and actually save and retrieve out content. Normally this would be … Continue reading →

Welcome to the third installment of PHP-ing like a productive person. It’s code writing time. Here is how I like to start: touch index.php Yes, I’m a toucher. Sue me! The Front Controller The index file seems like a good … Continue reading →

In part one of this series I imparted some serious knowledge and discussed a lot of theoretical bullshit. Not all of it went over well, and not all of it was PHP specific. A lot of the stuff we talked … Continue reading →

PHP gets a lot of flack for being a shitty language. This reputation is unfortunately well deserved. It is an ugly, quirky, idiosyncratic mess. But at the same time, PHP remains one of the most popular web programming languages out … Continue reading →

LaTeX is fully extensible. Just about every command you can think of can be overloaded and redefined in your document. Or the document class definition. Or a custom made package file. This is the beauty of this system. You can … Continue reading →

How do you tackle big refactoring projects for your chosen language, framework and platform? I’ve been sort of struggling with a very old, twisted and convoluted PHP mess as of lately, and I’m finding that there are just not that … Continue reading →

Back in 2008, at the height of the Web 2.0 craze I wrote a post titled JavaScript will the the next big language. Four years have passed, and yeah – it happened. Not necessarily in the way I expected it … Continue reading →

We did this a few times before but I figured we might as well do it again. If you don’t know what the hell am I talking about, let me explain. I’m talking about a thread in which I ask … Continue reading →

Few days ago, a buddy of mine contacted me with a problem. He was tasked with creating about a thousand form letters (for snail mail distribution). Being an awesome dude, he turned to open source solutions – and specifically LaTex … Continue reading →

Programming is not a craft, but an art form. A lot of professions out there merely require skill an experience. You do not need to be creative to be an excellent plumber, mechanic or a systems administrator. You simply need … Continue reading →

Last week Shamus Young has decided to open source his excellent proof of concept, procedural world generation project codenamed “Frontier”. This is actually quite exciting as there is a possibility that someone will clean it up, and manage to tweak … Continue reading →

Here is an uncomfortable truth: some text editors will make you more productive than others. You can argue this back and forward, but you know it is not a lie. It is quite possible to write all your code in … Continue reading →

People ask me why on Earth would I subject myself to such dreadful text editor as vim. With it’s weird mode system, nonstandard keyboard shortcuts and all kinds of strange quirks it is not what you would call a user-friendly … Continue reading →

There are two types of programmers in the world: those who care about programming font, and those who don’t concern themselves with typography. As a code producing entity, why would you even need to care about such things as fonts? … Continue reading →