Record as I Am

Tech && Soccer && PHP Coding - More Bolivian than America expected.

Nicholas has started sleeping through the night, as of last week, and while it hasn't been every single night yet, its happened more often than not. I'm glad for Staci, since she's not a night owl like me, staying up past 10 or 10:30 was harder on her.

This also means I've found some time to work on my project sites and blogs.

The feature I've been looking forward to the most, merge tracking, made it into the latest Subversion release. I'm not sure why, but branching/merging has been a conceptually scary thing for me for a long time. I'd always be afraid that somehow I'd mess up the merge and lose updates or somehow mangle my code beyond repair.

Sandy sent me a link listing anti-patterns as applied to management practices. For those not up on the jargon, an anit-pattern is a bad practice that is repeated frequently. I first heard this term in terms of programming patterns and anti-patterns, but I've since heard it used in non-programming contexts.

Cal Evans wrote a straightforward and excellent tutorial on how to to use Zend_Auth and its OpenID adapter to authenticate users today.

Zed Shaw provides a very useful insight into what makes a project work.  I'm posting this here a) so that I can refer to it again in the future and b) the hypothesis passes my "Yup-I've-been-there" test.

Don't expect to find it here, but Laughine Meme posted the most comprehensive one I could find.  You would think that with the introduction in 5.

After two summers during high school where I had the pleasure of working with Visual Basic and Access, you couldn't pay me enough to program with an MS designed language again.  And, even though I have a basic understanding of Java, very few interesting web sites use Java as their foundation.

Why do newbies like to tightly couple systems to the point that a simple change is very likely to result in everything breaking?  Is it just a lack of experience, ie not having a big system fail on you? Its a shame if failure is the only thing you learn from.  The other part of the equation is that too often we're measured by how much code we write, not how much good code we write.

The more I use subversion, the more I find ways to make it do more heavy lifting for me.  I'm not talking about the kind of subversion that gets you a one way ticket to gitmo, but the open source version control system.  I use it to manage my websites here, to keep them updated with the development copies I work on at home.