Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
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.
We did it, we killed popups. Most of the time I don't even notice that some websites are trying to load a popup because the browser automatically blocks them. For those that manage to circumvent the browsers rules, I have an extra popup add-on that blocks them too. We should celebrate. We won the war!
One of the biggest problem we have in programming is: It doesn't work. When you talk to a mechanic, telling him "My car doesn't work" will not help him find a solution. You may say, the car doesn't turn on, I have a flat, the fog lights are always off. Not only this tells the mechanic that your car doesn't work, but it also gives him an idea of what is not working, helping him find a solution faster.
