Exciting new for last week. I was working on some unit tests for my new ClubLaunchpad.com site. I was doing some work to determine conflict groups when members want to sign up to conflicting clubs, and each club and each member has requirements and preferences in terms of what they want. As part of this I did some work with the Collection class that laravel uses. It’s a fancy array() in many ways, and is how you would expect a result from a database call to come back.

I’ve been coding with PHP for a long, long time and over that time lots and lots of that work has been leveraging form buildings and table builders to make powerful and useful (though often dull looking) forms. There’s so many different relations that you can need to represent on a form, and so many different validation rules that you need to capture. And then there’s the mix between frontend permissions, backend permission, and javascript and all the rest of it.

What methods can you take to find good PHP packages?

This post is about trying to limit SQL queries, by the use of a method called “caching”. I’m going to talk about different methods ways of thinking about caching.

In my 20+ year career as a coder I have seen, many times, cases where someone thought they had found a way to make things easier and simpler, and, this is the crucial bit, more powerful. I did a maths degree at Uni, and I intrinsically understood the problems here. It’s the law of diminishing returns. Let’s get concrete with some examples. The no code lego-esque dream that never dies The first time I thought about it was in my first job out of uni in 2002.

I’ve been working for a client, and the e-commerce solution I built along with Mandy for them has a multi-currency feature. They wanted to have the customer shown the most suitable currency when they arrive on the site, and so we had to come up with a way to do that. The first thing was to find out which country they were in, and the answer we fell to first was a lookup service by IpLocate.

We use timers everywhere, and most of the time how they work is fine. But I’ve come across a slightly different need. For those who struggle with working, and procrastinate, there is the “Pomodoro” technique which advises on setting a timer for 20 mins and commiting to focusing on work throughout that 20 mins before stopping for a break. I like this and have used it a couple of times to just get going on a project, but this use case actually means a normal timer is often not quite the right thing.

A quick survey of schema.org usage on Product List pages with some conclusions

Schema.org is a website that holds the commonly used standards for encoding information about the content of your webpages in a way that makes it easier for the likes of Google and Bing to understand what your page is about. This post is about how products information is encoded. Here’s the page for a Product. The question I want to address is “How do I create an acceptable entry for a specific product”.

I’ve repeatedly come up with the issue of “where do I put this file” and even “what should I name this file”. There’s a bunch of things to consider. Is it important that the original name of the file persists if someone were to “Save As” on it. That is, do we need to reference the original filename in the url it’s accessed from Is it important that the image cant be guessed.