April 16th, 2012

Believe it or not (and why wouldn't you?), other than my one obligatory "Learn Apache and PHP in 24 hours" experience with setting up an Apache server I have always just relied on 'packaged goods' servers like WAMP and XAMP to do all the dirty work for me. With their easy install packages and pretty GUI's to enable, disable and sometimes download modules it has always made it easy for me to get to what I really want to do... code. 

My employers have always made this easy as well by employing the use of system administrators who (as you may know) often times also double as the narcissistic control freaks who would never dare let you touch a server (even a dev server) yourself. Hence, my hands on was a little weak.

All that has changed at my new company. After years of being kept 'in a cell' so to say I am being abruptly thrown back out into the real world where a developer needs to wear multiple hats. Suddenly I am being given production ...   Read more...

September 27th, 2011

So today I was on a phone interview where we were looking over some code I had written a while back but am presenting as example code. As we went through I was called out on what is probably a pretty rookie mistake.

Here is the code, see if you can find where I am wasting memory....

$i = 1;
foreach ($answers as $index=>$value) {
	$returnValues['answers'][$i]['id'] = $value['id'];
	$returnValues['answers'][$i]['answer'] = ucwords($value['answer']);
	$returnValues['answers'][$i]['correct'] = ucwords($value['correct']);
	$i++;
}

Well it turns out that rather than initiate var $i and increment it (using up precious space) I should have just used $index.
Now the flipside of this is that I did not want a zero indexed array and so I still would have had to add 1 to $i ($i+1) each time.

foreach ($answers as $index=>$value) {
	$nonZeroIndex = $index+1;
	$returnValues['answers'][$nonZeroIndex]['id'] = ...  
             
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September 27th, 2011

Just finished implementation of the Sidecar analytics program into the ecommerce platform for eFashionSolutions.

Sidecar is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don't let you see what's happening "today" until the day after.

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg.com, you would see the traffic spike in Sidecar immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

If instead you relied solely on a service like Google Analytics, it would be up to 24 hours before you even knew about the ...   Read more...

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