Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

  • Keeping Your Life in Subversion

    Joey Hess – Keeping Your Life in Subversion: „I keep my life in a Subversion repository. For the past five years, I’ve checked every file I’ve created and worked on, every email I’ve sent or received, and every config file I’ve tweaked into revision control. Five years ago, when I started doing this using CVS,…

  • Opening New Browser Windows

    Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on the Top-10 New Mistakes of Web Design is old (from 1999), but (sadly) still relevant – I’ve lost hope that sites like heise.de and golem.de will ever get this: „Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on…

  • Advice for Computer Science College Students

    Joel Spolsky’s Advice for Computer Science College Students: „When you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that. The difference between a tolerable…

  • Software stories

    Giles Turnbull – Software stories: „I hope more developers will start telling the stories behind their apps; it’s interesting for anyone who uses the app, and can really help them understand little details.“

  • Camels and Rubber Duckies

    Joel Spolsky – Camels and Rubber Duckies „A lot of other good technologies have doomed themselves with high prices: Apple WebObjects was irrelevant as an application server because it started at $50,000. Who cared how good it was? Nobody ever used it! Anything made by Rational. The only way these products get into the hands…

  • Five faces of a web application: Web GUI, web service, CLI, API, data

    While working on our new web application DC5, a total rewrite of its predecessor DC4, it occurred to me that you could say there’s five ways of looking at a web application, five interfaces that matter to its users. Getting any of these right, making it beautiful, is an art in itself. Getting all of…

  • The present and future value of Python

    Jon Udell’s Vancouver Python Workshop talk on The present and future value of Python: „The endgame here is a hybrid data engine with object, relational, and XML surfaces. Could you build such a thing in Python? I don’t see why not. If you can build a scalable high-performance object database like ZODB in Python, I’ll…

  • Software Engineering Practices for Large-Scale PHP Projects

    From 2002, J. Scott Johnson’s Software Engineering Practices for Large-Scale PHP Projects presentation (viewable with Internet Explorer only): „Aspects of Large Scale Projects: Version control Design notes Code reviews Knowledge capture Bug tracking Test plans Event Logging Throughout The Code Error Handling Throughout The Code Dynamic Error Alerting (to administrators) Redundancy 0 Data Loss Translation…

  • Apache JMeter

    „Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions. […] It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or…

  • A HOWTO on Optimizing PHP

    John Lim – A HOWTO on Optimizing PHP with tips and methodologies: „In this chapter, we explain why optimizing PHP involves many factors which are not code related, and why tuning PHP requires an understanding of how PHP performs in relation to all the other subsystems on your server, and then identifying bottlenecks caused by…