End Your If

Author: Jamie

  • CakePHP Version Comparison with PHP Version Comparison

    I’ve seen a few recent blog articles comparing the new version of PHP 5.4 to its predecessors and I thought I should get involved with this a bit as well.

    To perform this test, I will layout the conditions I have chosen.  I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible.  I currently run a Dell Laptop with Windows 7 on it:

    Windows NT 6.1 build 7601 (Unknown Windows version Business Edition Service Pack 1) i586

    Because I often do a lot of .NET development recently I have PHP running as a CGI under IIS 7.5.

    I then created a very simple .NET application that performs 100 requests of the same web page and tracks the response time.  These lists of response times are sorted and the highest and lowest responses are dropped.  The average is then calculated from this.

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  • 2011: Year in Review

    The New Year has arrived, I wasn’t quite prepared to sum up my year on December 31st because I was busy spending time with the kids during my, well deserved, one week off for the holidays.  This last year was probably the hardest year of my life.  At my current job, I stepped up and took on a big management role while being lead developer on multiple projects – for some reason I made this mistake again…

    Even though this was a hard year, there certainly were big rewards.  I dove into some new technology with the Photon Socket Server from Exitgames; got back into C# and .NET; released two books and currently editing my third; watched my kids walk for the first time; visited Seattle twice and met one of the now former lead developers of MVC .NET; launched a new website (Webistrate – Draw your own conclusions) – very happy with the creative name on this one!; and many, many more things.

    What did I learn this year?  Don’t bite more than you can chew!  Don’t make a major platform change during an extremely tight deadline!  Don’t carry your anger with you everywhere – the world truly isn’t out to get you, well maybe sometimes it is!  Interviewing people is not an overly enjoyable process, mostly because it takes 3 bad interviews for even 1 mediocre one.  However, the one that’s really good is always easy to pick from the bunch.  A few late hires were made at the end of the year that will be starting soon, hopefully all the hard interviewing will truly pay off and more fantastic people will join the team we are building.

    That’s quite a bunch of negatives up there, but we do typically learn from our mistakes, so what about some positives?  Writing books are hard work; but a lot more fun than doing day-to-day development work.  When I write books, I find that I really take my time and think more about how I want to accomplish something because my solution will be used by many people in many different scenarios.  Blogging is also a lot of fun, but is probably more time consuming than book writing, blogs are typically successful because of repeat, good, quality content – hence why this blog is not allowing me to stay home every day and write (not that it’s not good quality of course :p that I unfortunately do not blog as much as I would like too!).

    So what can we look forward to in 2012?  Well another book from me, this time on PhoneGap.  Mobile development and more specifically the adoption of HTML5 in the main stream (Microsoft, Adobe, etc…) will make it extremely important for us developers to focus more on attempting to build one codebase for many different platforms, not just the web anymore.  Instead we will need to develop for mobile devices (the one million and one different kinds of course), pad devices, even Windows 8 devices!

    Hopefully from all of the lessons learned in 2011, this New Year will be a lot less stress free!

     

  • MVC 3 Routing Example

    Below is an excerpt of a chapter from my new book: 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3.

    In today’s heavily fought battles for search engine supremacy, it’s quite difficult to winthe race with a website address that looks like:

    http://www.example.com/books/details?id=4.

    Using routes, the website can look like:

    http://www.example.com/20-recipes-for-mvc3

    which provides much more context, both to the user and the search engine.

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  • 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3

    Yesterday marks the official launch of my second book: 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3.  The book is being published by O’Reilly and is available in both e-book or print edition.  I’m quite proud of this book as I’ve feel like my writing style was really able to mature while working with a real editor to bring a great cookbook on ASP.NET’s MVC 3.

    The tagline for the book is, Faster, Smarter Web Development and that truly is my goal with all of the recipes in the book.  It covers basic material from authentication and emails to more complex features like routing and AJAX – even has an excellent tutorial on converting your website into a mobile site in a few easy steps!

  • Developers to the rescue of designers…again!

    I don’t know about you, but my designers love their custom fonts and I’m tired of slicing and reslicing images – especially when the website is multilingual.

    CSS3 to the rescue allowing us to import custom fonts and make them work cross-browser.  Check out how to use the @font-face CSS3 tag to do it!