All entries of my technical and business blog

This means that: how to translate between PHP and System-i lingo.

Just finished a talk at the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association and wanted to share the info. This particular talk was an introduction to PHP.

In a break from my normal type of tutorial, I just want to give a real quick overview and highlight of a fictitious “case study” to demonstrate the importance of load testing your application with apache’s ab tool.

Finished presenting today at MidwestPHP 2013. My talk on Enterprise PHP Architecture through Design Patterns and Modularization went great - at least I hope!

In one of our applications, an event system requires a start and end date. There is validation to check to make sure the end date is after the start date.

Recently, I had a programmer create a new feature for one of our products. He inadvertently caused another feature of our product to look less polished and function a bit weird. (I called it ‘wonkified’). The consensus of the group was to push out the feature, and then go back and fix the broken part of the old feature in the next week or so.

I constantly look for ways to explain to non-technical people the daily challenges I must face and decisions I make. I like using analogies. One of the biggest ones I face where I work currently is the support of out-dated browsers.

When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, I had the problem where the terminal would boot up until it said something about checking battery state, and then freeze. If I flipped to a different terminal, I could sudo launch lightdm - and then login on the first terminal. Obviously, this wasn’t my first choice in fixing this, though.

One of the things I struggle with is the validation of data objects. I submit that there is such a thing as a dumb data object and a validation domain object. The validation object could also be some sort of helper or a service I guess. But, the point is, that the main data object doesn’t have validation on it. It has coupled objects that provide that validation.

Recently, someone mentioned to me Conway’s Game of Life was a programming challenge at a code retreat they attended. I had never heard of it so I went to take a look at the concept. It seemed like a cool idea. So, I decided to use Canvas and Javascript to create my own instance of it. This is just my first draft of it - so take a look. And, if I’ve done anything incorrectly, please please please! let me know.