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Experienced developers are expensive. In a world where cutting cost seems like the best option, companies try to maximize their profit by spending less and less on good talent. It is much cheaper to hire someone who just learned php a few weeks ago then a seasoned developer. But it becomes a very bad investment when the newbie introduces insecure code. The problem is, a lot of things learned from those LAMP CRUD application tutorial do not focus much on security. When this code is introduced to a commercial application, the damage can be very expensive. I like how stackoverflow users are fighting very hard to eradicate SQL injection, I am doing my part too but it seems like it is much easier to find insecure code on-line. That said, I will attempt to scare you off your feet so you know better what is the cost of SQL injection.

Parsing the browser User Agent is very unreliable. Not only users can easily manipulate it but the string can be very inconsistent. There were times where I needed to write specific code for Internet Explorer but I don't like writing in line JavaScript or loading a separate script just for that. I wish browser makers could agree on making unique GUID that can easily be looked up on a table to determine the browser. So Instead, I make use of IE conditional comments to set values that will only be present in Internet Explorer.

jQuery is the holy grail for JavaScript developers. It made everything so much easier. You never have to worry about browser quirks when writing your application. Before, you would have to write few hundreds of lines of code to do a very simple task; but with jQuery a single line of code can end all your nightmares. Still, I had a very hard time adopting (accepting) jQuery. Not because I thought it was bad, but because I believed I could do it myself.

I write on this blog mostly to share what I learn in my career and also to improve my writing. I had very low expectation when I posted a link to a recent article I wrote on reddit. I never expected to shoot to number one in a matter of minutes in the technology subreddit. Looking at my Google analytic dashboard , The maximum I attained was over 1700 people at a time reading my blog and that was plenty to overwhelm my server.

This tutorial is a follow up the previous post Getting started with your first website. On the previous tutorial we have selected a hosting company and a operating system to run our server. We used Apache as a web server, MySQL as a database, and PHP as a programing language. The next step will be to setup an application that make use of all these technologies and create something useful. Our application will be a WordPress Blog.

Ubuntu is one of my favorite OS. It is very user friendly, perfect for surfing the web, for music, for movies and even gaming. At the same time you have all the power of Linux behind it so I can also use it for working on my projects. Recently, I bought a new laptop and unfortunately I found myself returning it because it was a just a giant hardware dongle. I was hoping to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu but it only accepted a new windows OS. I learned my lesson and from now on I do extensive research before buying any new laptop.

There are those moments where I feel the need to share. Sometimes it is when I do something small like fix a bug, or even smaller like when I first really understood what the value of π (PI) actually refers to. It feels great and when it happens I want to share. Unfortunately when I talk about it, the conversion from thoughts in my head to spoken words is a lossy transaction. I end up being a complete bore. It's much easier when my interlocutor is a friend, because he can tell me early on that I am full of it. The subject can be very interesting but the medium of delivery ruins it all. Saying "A good programmer never assumes the user input is in English" may result in agreeing nods from your listeners but I bet they will forget as soon as you turn around. However, if you tell a story of how you struggled with a bug and couldn't understand why the user input was garbled and how through painful trial and error you figured out it was all because you were assuming the user would only input ASCII characters. This could make a better impact. So here is my attempt to say A good programmer download applications only from the original source.

I am a web developer by trade and I program as a hobby. I love the idea that people who choose this career path are considered smart. Some of my non-tech savvy friends ask me questions like how Facebook works and they are awed when I answer: Facebook uses a giant database. In front of them I feel like a winner. The go to guy when we are talking about anything technical. But then I go back home. I open my local repository and look at my past, present, and future projects. Then I think to myself: I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.

I was recently monitoring my server logs and I noticed multiple requests to a unusual path. /humans.txt. The request returned a 404 since it didn't exist but it got my attention. A few seconds of googling revealed a very interesting idea: a website can talk to bots with the robots.txt file and talk to humans with humans.txt.

In high school I always wondered how some kids memorized all the math formulas. Especially the long ones. I am not particularly good in math but since I am terrified with the idea of giving up I kept at it until I found ways to deal with it. I couldn't memorize the formulas but knowing the first few digits of a sine and cosine of special angles (30,45,60 and so on) proved to be very useful. I loved computers since I was a kid and I was labeled the computer guy in the family. Everyone came to me (and still do) to get help with the Microsoft Word issues, Excel, modem setup, unresponsive mouse, broken screen (not that I could do much with a broken CRT monitor), driver update, unplugged cable, and so on. I may be very disorganized but one thing I can say for sure is I almost aways find a solution to the problems presented to me.