All entries of my technical and business blog

In the last decade or two, the US proliferation of low quality reality television shows has been unstoppable. “Big Brother” would be ashamed by some of his siblings. There are shows that follow famous people (although, I’m not entirely certain why some of them are famous), shows that involve the audience, shows that support nerds; basically anything you can imagine! I pretend I’m above this, I surely don’t fall into the category of people who sit at home and pine over “The Bachelor.” I normally flip the channel right past these shows.

Fair warning - I normally don’t write too personally in this blog - but this one is something different. Something I think people need to read.

Every leader has a particular methodology or key point they focus on. Whether it be a small detail, a general philosophy or a repeated phrase, you know that if you are near that leader, you will become very familiar with their demand. In my team, my demand is to pay attention to detail.

In an earlier column, I discussed the advantage of using longer and more verbose variable and method names. When you program using this more descriptive style, the code is easier to understand and more maintainable. However, a short and concise method with a revealing name may not always be sufficient when it comes to complex processes. To fill this gap, PHP has comments.

Bugs in code suck. It’s bad enough when you misspell a function or forget a semi-colon. That’s embarrassing and annoying. But what’s worse is when you write code that seems to work fine, is syntactically correct, yet still has a bug. You know you did it right, but somehow it’s also wrong. That’s not good. That makes me paranoid and second guess the rest of my work. That doesn’t help me be a Confident Coder at all.

There are two reactions to reading a new section of code for the first time. Sadly, one of the most common seems to be of confusion, dismay, followed possibly by some sort of expletive (or many, depending on the length of the code). The other is one of the most beautiful reactions, the most flattering, the most sought after reaction: “Oh, that makes sense” or “That’s cool.”

Sweaty palms, a fast heart rate and an overwhelming sense of dread.

Let’s talk a little bit about session fixation in PHP. Such a fun topic, right? Tons to get into here. But, let’s just touch the surface on two VERY SIMPLE things you can be doing now to make sure that your website is safe.

Javascript objects have a built-in function called toString() which pretty much does what you think it does - it renders a string representation of that object.

At Small Shops United, we use MadMimi for our email list software. I took a look at the PHP libraries that were available and found them extremely out of date, lacking, and just plain not working in certain areas.