Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
I'm glad we stopped hearing people say "the computer is so stupid that it can't even <insert something simple here>". I used to have a teacher in college that would start every class with one of those remarks he would think is clever.
Imagine working for 12 hours straight, without talking any break. You build modules, tools, and your to do list keeps getting shorter and shorter. You don't want to stop because you are in the zone. Your mojo is up the roof. But suddenly you get this Error:
I am a big fan of the Symfony framework. I feel like it is the one PHP tool where you spend less time fighting the framework and more time building your application. But for the few times it doesn't do the things you want, you have to go through the documentation to figure out how things are done the proper way.
Every time I get the feedback box from Google Analytics, I write in all caps to beg them to block spam on their side. Analytics Spam is annoying because it inflates your traffic. It would have been nice if you could block the IP address of all the machines that trigger it but it is not that simple.
The DailyWTF thrive on the stupid mistakes developers make. It is easy to look at a product and think how stupid the owner must be to neglect some obvious beneficial improvements. Stackoverflow.com was a popular one. A lot of people thought a lot of things they were doing were stupid and that they had obvious solutions that would work. But in reality, the stackoverflow team is pretty competent. If you see them taking a route, you pretty much know that they have done enough research to find it to be the best solution.
WordPress runs the web. The majority of websites currently run it and no one complains. When I see people struggling to start a website, I suggest they use WordPress. It takes the problem of figuring out what programming language, framework, subject, or theme out of the equations. All they have to do is click a few buttons and they have a powerful blogging engine at there fingertips.
I am no designer. At least I can't say that I have an artistic eye but there are a few fundamentals, not necessarily reserved to designers, that we should all know when designing web pages. Not many years ago, the maintainers of websites were called webmasters. To me it sounded like old wizards, comical yet very knowledgeable in their field.
Programmers like to set up their machines their own way. Sometimes restricting their environment to strict corporate policies will directly affect their creativity. Luckily with Apache and PHP it is possible to create unique profiles for each developer to allow them to configure their environment in the way they want without affecting others.
There is nothing worse than having errors you don't see. There are mistakes we make and IDEs do their best to notify us as we type. Things like syntax errors, missing semi colons, wrong data type assignment. These things happen and the compiler throws an error before we launch our application. The worse kind of errors are those that only happen in specific conditions.
When I'm in a restaurant, there is nothing that scares me more than a waiter that doesn't write down my order. Especially when we come in as a group. What if they forget? What if they charge me for something I didn't order? For that matter what if I say I didn't order anything and they just brought me food? There is no paper trail to prove otherwise. The stakes are just too high to make a mistake.
