A collection of my interests, ambitions and ramblings. From a diverse range of topics including Astronomy and Programming.
http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-asynchronous/
http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-creativity/
http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/
https://github.com/features/projects/codereview
https://github.com/holman/feedback/
http://zachholman.com/posts/why-github-hacks-on-side-projects
http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
http://speakerdeck.com/u/holman/p/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github
Great post by Tim O’Reilly (of publishing fame) on the merits of business and profit using Steve jobs as a great inspiration. The standout quote is;
“profit in business is like gas in a car, you don’t want to run out of gas neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations”
Steve had it right; build a business of passion and the profit will come.
It seems to me that the more people you have as supposed ‘experts’ on a problem the less people use their own initiative. Yes, I’m generalising massively here but it’s something I see all the time.
It often goes like this; “ah well that person knows about this, so I won’t think about what I’m doing and just ask them instead”. More often than not it seems that this is caused by a complete lack of understanding of the project or situation at hand.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like being helpful and I’ll always try to help someone out in anyway possible but it’s definitely a case of asking the right questions and not just defaulting to asking someone because you can’t be bothered to think for yourself.
#end of rant
This is insanely amazing. If only the sky over London was like this….
I’ve had quite a lot of trouble with people upgrading wordpress, installing themes and plugins etc via FTP. After quite a bit of internet searching and trying quite a few fixes, the one I found that works was from this blog; http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/letting-wordpress-users-install-themes-plugins-without-ftp-credentials-199111.html
Basically the fix is to force WP into using a ‘direct’ file transfer mode (as FTP never works). The reason why you may have problems with this is because of permissions and execution rights on Apache.
So here’s the line you need to add to wp-config.php
define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’);
And then I chmod wp-content/themes to 777 and wp-content/plugins to 777. Fixed.
Is it just me or does this make more and more sense now?
In my head every app should be JS framework based frontend calling some exposed services from a backend (JSON) that points to a NoSQL DB with a lovely layer of caching in between.
The frontend in the above system will be doing all the heavy work and just persisting to the DB. Decoupled and very scalable.
But I guess PHP and .net are going to be around for quite some time longer.
More on this topic soon. Fleshing out a diagram at present (it’ll be shit)
After a long, gruelling evening of finishing off a theme build in Magento it’s become pretty clear to me that theming it sucks.
I think Magento is an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform, however I really hate the way themes work on it and everything they entail. I think in the Magento’s guys heads everyone would be just changing some CSS and Images to make a different skin, but seriously how often does this happen?
My biggest problem with platforms such as Magento and Wordpress is that there’s too much markup returned in the requests for objects. For example, getting categories by using list categories in WP - it returns in a nice ul, li list and I can change the tags. Great. But why? Surely every dev can write a for loop?
Give the developer more freedom. That is all. And I know you can do all this stuff without using the defined methods in WP and Magento, so don’t start.
As a developer I believe the moment we stop learning is the moment we should stop tapping on the keyboard. Learning new technologies keeps you ahead, but it does more than that - it keeps your passion alive.
So on this theme, here’s a little list of everything that I want to do within the next 6 months.
I think it’s too easy for us to just stick to the tools we know and never push the boundaries. This is especially true in production sites - servers are setup for particular technologies and we never say “ah actually let’s do it in X new technology”. I think you’re really lucky as a developer if you get to use new technology and frameworks in anything other than your local testing. That said though, we should always be adding touches into projects, not for the client but for yourself.
