Posted in Programming on Friday, December 16th, 2005
John Zeratsky provides some excellent advice, some things worth thinking about once in a while while working on your projects...
Do you really know the best way to solve the short-term problem while solving long-term ones? Do you really know how your app/song/project/whatever is going to evolve? Do you really know what your customers/listeners/friends/partners are going to want in 3 or 6 months or a year?
Posted in Programming on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 | Via
Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, and authoritative representation within a system.
If you program, you've probably read that piece of text before. The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle is an excellent principle for people who write code. This PDF, Keep It DRY, Shy, and Tell the Other Guy is written by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas and presents what they call OO in One Sentence
.
The article is brief, but gets into their thoughts on some important concepts and practices and how they effect your work as a programmer.
Posted in Programming on Thursday, November 24th, 2005
After discovering that
Digg is vulnerable to XSS attacks, Nitesh Dhanjani passes off this link which provides a nice suite of XSS tests and examples.
I've used some of these before for testing, and it's worth reading and playing with this stuff to get your head around it. As the author states
This page is for people who already understand the basics of XSS attacks but want a deep understanding of the nuances regarding filter evasion
Posted in Programming on Saturday, December 17th, 2005
This document lists all the message headers defined in the HTTP/1.1 protocol, with short descriptions. In the list, the name of the header is a link to its definition in the protocol itself.
Posted in Programming on Friday, December 23rd, 2005
Harry Fuecks deconstructs some of the MVC history and provides some thoughtful discussion (see the comments too). For me, in the end it's about some of the points outlined there (especially Back to Beyond), and ultimately I want my code organized and agile.
Posted in Programming on Friday, March 17th, 2006
Get up to speed on character encodings with this great article by Kevin Yank over st Sitepoint. Lengthy yet well written, there are more links to follow at the end of the article.
As usual with content from SP blogs, read the comments for some extra links and discussion.
Posted in Programming on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
A succinct writeup about setting up a system to processing credit card transactions online, it covers the basics and offers some extra reading links at the bottom (Cautious Advice for Accepting Online Payments is a worthy read). A good start if you've never ventured into this territory before.
Posted in Programming on Monday, September 4th, 2006
I had to calculate distance with latitude/longitude for a project a few years ago and did all of the logic in PHP. I'd be interested in seeing if Ben's example is a bit quicker. Here he builds a query that includes all of the calculations needed to "SELECT * FROM companies HAVING distance <= $distance ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT xx".
Posted in Programming on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 | Via
A collection of slides and presentations written by folks who have had experience scaling up web based applications like Flickr, Livejournal and others. Put some time aside to check all of these presentations out!
Posted in Programming on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 | Via
Wikipedia's definition for race condition, which can become an issue in various situations when programming (example).
Posted in Programming on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 | Via
A useful page for viewing how different browsers handle UTF-8 characters and also as a source for characters to use while testing data input. Don't miss the links at the bottom of the page, which offer other samplers and some handy overviews of fonts that handle unicode.
Posted in Programming on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 | Via
This comparison sees two developers building an equivalent application in Rails and Django and writes about the differences between the two tasks.
It's a pretty interesting read for anyone looking for a framework, or someone who is simply building in any language and looking to see how these two frameworks handle some of these tasks. Our CMS does a lot of the things that is outlined in this article, but there are a few ideas that I'm sure to pinch from this!
Posted in Programming on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 | Via
A very clear, well documented article covering many different types of sql injection attacks. This is the result of a larger security review, and though we'd not actually used SQL injection to penetrate a network before, we were pretty familiar with the general concepts. We were completely successful in this engagement, and wanted to recount the steps taken as an illustration.
Posted in Programming on Monday, February 14th, 2005
Drew Mclellan gives a short write-up about designing URI's and offers some rules for doing so. The ensuing commentary also presents some good ideas.
Posted in Programming on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 | Via
A simple little overview about the MVC design pattern, with a Ruby bend to it. This is worth a read if you are just getting your head around MVC or just getting into Ruby.
Posted in Programming on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 | Via
A useful cheat sheet for when you have to dive into your .htaccess file and start redirecting requests. Some great tips inclugin "nice looking urls with pagination" and the always popular "block referer spam".
Posted in Programming on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 | Via
Natural Docs is a documentation generator that scans your code and builds high-quality HTML documentation based on a natural syntax that reads like plain English. I haven't tested this but it looks promising.
