Programming

They talk with the business, come up with solutions and make bright key decisions about architecture. But they don’t program. During the course of the project they ensure that d... 05/29/2008

Back in the frontier days of the web, ”Webmaster” was a vaunted, almost mythical, title. The Webmaster was a techno-shaman versed the black arts needed to make words and images... 11/02/2007

After thinking about doing it for many months, I finally converted 2tbsp.com from Wordpress 2 to Drupal 5. I didn't make this move because of anything wrong with Wordpress. Word... 08/23/2007

Yogi Berra once said "it's deja vu all over again", and he was right. For each HTML/CSS template I build I find myself dealing with the same issues. How do I clear eve... 08/23/2007

Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor... 10/28/2007

Businesses need a website to compete in today's markets. The problem is everyone else has a website too, because they want to compete. The result is thousands of sites selling t... 08/06/2007

Chapter 4. Advanced Technological Judgment How to Tell the Hard From the Impossible It is our job to do the hard and discern the impossible. From the point of view of most worki... 04/09/2007

Chapter 3. Intermediate Personal Skills How to Stay Motivated It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by the desire to create artifacts that... 04/09/2007

To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing... 11/10/2007

When the database seems to be "slow" first consider all of the following points as e.g. making a certain query absolutely unnecessary by simply using a more sophisticated algori... 11/09/2007

I recently discussed mod_ext_filter , a loadable module used with Apache. It allows you to easily process your content through an external program before it’s passed onto... 02/14/2007

Programmers use a lot of tools throughout the day. Some of them are pretty obvious: a fast PC, wide monitor (or three), a robust IDE, and good coffee. Other items tend to get ov... 02/14/2007

Almost every experienced web developer who works with Apache is at least vaguely familar with mod_rewrite . It’s most frequently used to reformat ugly URLs containing a lo... 02/14/2007

(This article is Part 2 in a series about Apache’s loadable modules. The previous topic was mod_ext_filter ). As former Microsoft-ite who made the leap to OSS, one of the... 02/14/2007

A case study One of the most interesting projects I’ve been involved with was developing and managing a site for an online automotive accessories retailer. At it’s p... 02/14/2007