All entries of my technical and business blog

So I’ve been looking at some parallax plugins with Javascript and CSS3 animations… and it got me to thinking: I have a great idea for a web site design firm.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently moved to PHPStorm. I’ve done a little bit of configuration and I plan to start using it more now. Here are a few things I really like:

We’ve just migrated to the PHPStorm IDE in my team. Commercial licenses are $200, personal are $100. I believe that the investment was well worth it. If you’ve been following my entries, you know I have a love affair with Eclipse PDT. It has been hard for an open source programmer like myself to want to buy software. But, we did it.

A few days (ok, a bunch of days) ago, someone asked me on twitter what I look for when I do a code review. Pretty certain I was tweeting that I was either… a) doing a code review or b) annoyed at doing a code review. heh. I thought for a bit, and I think I’ve distilled the list of things I look for. Now, mind you, I don’t set out with my checkbox list or a manual, I just look at the code and “feel” it. Yes, that sounds crazy. I understand. But, subconsciously, I think I’m doing the following things when I do code reviews:

One thing I’m really passionate about is using PHP in enterprise situations. I obviously care about Design Patterns in PHP. I’ve also done a lot of technical review of other books about refactoring away from bad code.

One debate that the guys on my team have been having revolves around the combination of Javascript and CSS files. There are two schools of thought. The keep them separate and the BFF - Big Fun File system. There are pro’s and cons to both… but as with everything, one particular way may not always be the best - we don’t always have to stay in extremes-land. Here are some thoughts. Feel free to weigh in.

I tend to want to use PHP Exceptions when I can. But, I don’t just leave them as is. I tend to have a large custom exception library. These exceptions extend the base Exception class in PHP - that’s about it.

So one of the things that really bothered me about the Zend ACL implementation in 1.x was the inherits() method. It simply would test to see if the current role inherited the roles you were testing against. Well, what if the role WAS the tested role? Then it would fail. So, to fix that, in my own Application_Model_Acl implementation, I wrote inheritsIncluding().

Do it. Catch your breath. Sit in one spot. Don’t reach for your phone. Look at the sky. Clear your mind.

I remember a scene from A night at the roxbury where the less-than-slick brothers take some girls back to their room and have a problem closing the deal. One of them keeps saying pickup lines while he has the girl sitting on his bed. She basically says OK - we’re past this. He just can’t seem to close the deal - no matter how much she wants him to.