All entries of my technical and business blog

Site Profile: amazondiscount.me

The goal was to use links that Amazon provided themselves to showcase categories and percentage discounts with my affiliate tag. The thought was a clean interface would easily encourage people to click a discount of say 90% but send affiliate contributions my way.

Read Something Else

Mar 6, 2012 business

Many years ago, a business mentor of mine told me that I should “read something else.” I didn’t know what he meant so I asked for more.

Don't Always Lead: Sometimes Just Be Great

Feb 28, 2012 business

What is the measurement of a good career? Promotion? Raises? Running a project / leading a team? Usually all of this. However, the most traditional measurement of success in a career is moving upward. Time to run a department, time to lead a team, etc. However, I submit a very radical idea: Sometimes just be great, don’t lead.

Zend Framework Use Filter with Paginator

Feb 21, 2012 zend-framework

By default, when using the Zend Paginator, the result set will come back as an array. If you are using a paginator associated with a database result set, and that db has a class defined for its row, it will come back as that class. However, if this is not the case, or you are not using information from a database, you may still want a different result than just a plain array.

When Writing Unit Tests, Test Against Absolutes

Feb 14, 2012 testing

So, while chatting with one of the developers on my team, we started talking about testing an XML document creation process he had been working on. He wrote a unit test and said “see, here is my class which generates the XML, and then here I use DomDocument to add the nodes I know it will have and test against that.”

Creating a custom Zend Framework Body Script helper

Jan 31, 2012 javascript zend-framework

It drives me nuts that the best practices with javascript that is not required for the initial rendering of your application is to be placed at the bottom of the document, yet frameworks (like Zend Framework) do not support that out of the box. (I recently found out that Joomla also shares this problem.)

Split Read/Write Connections in Zend Framework Database on the Application Level

Jan 24, 2012 mysql zend-framework

I’m no sys admin, so I can’t be sure, but I’ve seen lots of issues with using things like MySQL Proxy to fully separate the write and read queries in an application. Maybe it works, I don’t know… but I do know that if I can separate the connections in my code, that saves my Admin time… it doesn’t appear to give that much of a hit to performance either! Do keep in mind that this is only working at the table level in Zend Framework. If you use their database system, this should do the trick. If you do a lot of getting the adapter yourself, this won’t help you at all!