End Your If

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  • How to deal with stress at work

    I’m assuming I’m not alone with this one, but on a daily basis I seem to bring home a lot of stress from work.  At one point I use to bring home so much stress that I was unable to sleep at night.  From time-to-time it still happens, but with these techniques below I have been able to significantly improve the amount of stress I bring home from work.

    Before we discuss resolutions, let’s discuss the type of stress us web developers/project managers bring home on a daily basis.

    • Angry clients
    • Your team members not performing well
    • A mistake by you
    • A bug that you were unable to find
    • Too much work
    • Mean boss
    • Difficult co-workers

    I’m sure this list could carry on a lot longer, but I think we get the point with HOW much stress we can bring home on a daily basis.

    Let’s begin by breaking each one down. (more…)

  • When to use element() and when to requestAction()

    Several times a week it seems, someone at my office is asking, “Jamie, should I use $this->element() or $this->requestAction()?”

    Every time they ask, I ask them back, “What do you need to do?”

    There are a few simple ways to determine if using an element is better or a request action is better. (more…)

  • CakePHP Containable Statement Pitfalls

    On some of our more recent projects, we have been using the Containable behavior that CakePHP provides.  It works quite nicely, a lot easier than the previous format of having to bind and unbind models on the fly.

    The pitfalls began to appear when some of our clients were reporting that some pages are extremely slow.  After a bit of research, it was quite apparent that the root of the cause was attributed to us using the containable feature. (more…)

  • Keeping your CakePHP Controllers Clean

    As my office gains more and more experience with CakePHP, we are beginning to learn to build more organized web sites.  Looking back at our first few projects, I’m astonished to see how messy our controllers are!

    I know the controllers are the “brain” of MVC because it pieces our data to our views, but that doesn’t mean everything should go in there.  Our original controllers would contain all of our logic, all of our data manipulation, all of our custom queries, and some additional data validation.

    We are now working very hard to keep our controllers as clean and simple as possible.  My goal is to make every function in our controllers under 20 lines of code.  It might sound ambitious, but I think it is completely feasable. (more…)

  • Underscores and Internet Explorer Fun

    I think my favorite thing about being a web developer is wasting hours and hours of my time, my co-workers time, pretty much every ones time because Internet Explorer is retarded.

    Earlier this week, we were developing a site and we created a new sub domain off of our main domain.  Because we already had an existing sub domain for the same client, the team decided to postfix the sub domain with _new.  When we started testing our work, it didn’t start off well.  Open up Internet Explorer 7 and receive the login page, attempt to login and just get redirected back to the login page.

    We know there is nothing wrong with our login script as it works fine in Mozilla and it’s something that we’ve used on a million other projects.

    My head still hurts from banging it against the wall for quite some time to simply discover that Internet Explorer rejects session cookies when a domain contains an underscore (“_”) in the name!

    I know this is the shortest article I’ve ever written, but I had to vent.  Hopefully if you run into this problem you will Google it sooner than we did and this article will save you time and a headache!