After launching Fwd:Vault last month, it’s been a race to add the necessary features and functions to take the service broader. First on the list was more subscription tiers. I launched with just two: free and “unlimited everything.” I did this because, well, it was easy. Your instinct may be to dismiss my decision as [...]
Read More coding theory, crappy coding, software development, standardsI recently made the decision to store times on Fwd:Vault systems in Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. I decided to do this because I have time-sensitive events happening along several dimensions. Email coming into the system has several timestamps associated with it: the user’s initial delivery, relay from their mail server, and receipt by the [...]
Read More coding theory, fwdvault, software development, standards, tech support, Twitter, usabilityIt’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, [...]
Read More coding theory, crappy coding, php, programming, regular expressions, software developmentSay you’ve got two tables with the same structural layout but contain logically different information. A common example would be storing “deleted” records in a separate table to reduce table sizes, simplify queries, and improve performance. A record only exists in one of the two tables, either it’s deleted or it’s not. But sometimes you [...]
Read More coding theory, mysql, optimizationCore PHP does not include a define_once() function to complement functions like require_once() and include_once(), which is pretty silly in my opinion. While I am generally not a fan of using *_once statements due to the performance penalty (and incurred laziness), define_once is the exception. There are ways to look for a loaded/missing file, but [...]
Read More coding theory, handy functions, phpJeff Atwood’s latest post on Coding Horror provides great insight into the history and mindset of one of the Computer Science greats, Alan Kay. It’s a good read for any computer professional looking to delve further into the advances that Kay worked on. Unfortunately, Jeff has a pretty strong distaste of PHP, and blindly jumps [...]
Read More Academia, coding horror, coding theoryI’ve learned that one of the biggest office-cluttering offenders when you run a company is receipts. The government wants to see them for tax purposes, so you hold onto every last one to save every last dollar. The problem, of course, is that you’ll collect a crap ton of these stupid little bits of paper [...]
Read More coding theory, customer serviceAcross every language, platform, and experience level, you can summarize all programmers into just two groups: Those who are constantly learning, and those who think they know everything. The ones who learn are aware that they don’t know everything, and never hesitate to seek out new information when a new problem (or language, or platform) [...]
Read More coding theoryOver the last few years, I’ve noticed that the PHP community has, in general, started to favor include_once() and require_once() over the more standard include() and require(). For the uninitiated, the “_once” version of each function will check to see if a file has already been loaded. If it has, it will safely bypass loading [...]
Read More coding theory, crappy coding, software development, standards, zen cartOver at ClassicWines, we recently experienced a login issue, where data was not being saved to the session after submitting valid credentials. Enter your username, password, and you would end up back at the home page as if nothing happened. I was banging my head against my desk (literally) looking for the cause. Cut to [...]
Read More coding theory, usability