Category: Development

Last update on

Test Drive For Plugins and Themes is Not Popular Enough

The pricing dilemma with WordPress themes and plugins is a critical problem, mostly due to the widespread race to the bottom. Unfortunately, people don't understand the magnitude of a problem until they are personally involved and affected by the consequences. Discussing Business With Developers [caption id="attachment_11439" align="aligncenter" width="752"] Business owners and Developers working together[/caption] That's on of the reasons why I often have a hard time discussing business with developers working on a payroll for large companies. Part of them are not interested, nor involved with the actual business processes, or don't really care where do money come from. After all,… Continue Reading
Last update on

Why Does WordPress Fall Behind In Tech?

What I call a "Community Virus" is a fraction of a community that sets a bad example. You know, when you're a part of the society and there's a small (or larger) number of people doing bad stuff and are loud and annoying at the same time, and you tend to get embarrassed while shopping near them in the supermarket or at the airport. The Manifesto I was reading an email from Curtis with his manifesto - "NO is NOT a Curse Word" (definitely subscribe here and read it) and he's explaining his strategy for working with customers and valuing his services. It's a… Continue Reading
Last update on

Techniques For Self-Taught Computer Programmers

I built my first site nearly 20 years ago and even then I was able to source quite a lot of information online. Even though most of my learning was a combination of reading IDE manuals (QBasic), downloading manuals and guides on a floppy disk from Internet cafes, and reprinting original books in multiple copies since these were extremely rare to find. Some engineers here have been coding for 40 years and faced a far more conservative ecosystem while still being able to produce code decades later. Studying programming now is a no-brainer. Between YouTube and Udemy tutorials, Coursera and FreeCodeCamp training programs, tons… Continue Reading
Last update on

WP Core – dynamically resize images

The only issue with post-thumbnails I've had was the lack of ability to resize images dynamically. I had to use add_image_size() function to define image sizes which is ineffective for many different sizes used once (or a limited number of times) as it creates thumbnails for every single uploaded image. Kovshenin was my savior once again for the image_make_intermediate_size function. Unbelievable. [blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/kovshenin/status/176668168306167808"] Continue Reading
Last update on

Django Framework – First Impressions

I've been researching the Django framework for the last 2-3 weeks in my spare time. It's development is going on and on and I see many interesting innovative concepts realised behind. I tried it 3 years ago for a course project when we had to integrate the PIL (Python Image Library) into a web project with the existing technology. It was still first version and not much functional though. Poorly documented as well, but as I see now it is almost complete. Python is a powerful language and a web framework based on it i s a great idea. There are few CMS systems based… Continue Reading
Last update on

Django Translations: Multilingual, i18n, App Names

Django is a popular web framework written in Python that provides dynamic generated content and allows rapid development for different systems in the Internet. It provides a great interface to other products (via web services), gives ability to design a scalable application and most important, lies on a powerful language as Python (in other words, what you could do in Python, you could somehow reuse it in Django either by a component or by defining a custom logic down there). In my experience two of the most important things in a web application (no matter the framework, system and language)… Continue Reading
Last update on

JMockit Quick Tutorial and Revelation

JMockit is a powerful mocking framework in Java that provides extended functionality that goes beyond the capabilities of all other solutions on the market so far. While most mocking frameworks are proxy based and depend on Reflection to hide the dependent behavior, JMockit falls further and deeper with solving some critical problems such as mocking final classes and static methods by using the Instrumentation API presented in Java 5. The Instrumentation API allows a direct bytecode replacement in the virtual machine via java agents that modify the codebase of the current classes with the one from our mocked representation (either… Continue Reading
Last update on

CakePHP Headaches At A Glance

@jose_zap has replied to me regarding a tweet of mine comparing CodeIgniter and CakePHP and the different aspects of both technologies. Since Twitter itself is way restricted into the 140 chars (which I like most usually - less offtopic and media) I will better blog this off here as a couple of things I don't like in Cake. First of all, I've been doing Cake for a year and a half and have several projects up and running with different web services, sync mechanisms and so on. It's usually one of my preferred platforms (right after WP and Croogo which… Continue Reading
Last update on

Some Hate Over Cake’s i18n

I'm really fond of CakePHP's principles, but I'm too tired of its i18n features. For some reason internationalization, although one of the really major requirements for every framework or CMS, is implemented poorly in most of the systems I've worked with. Django had few disadvantages (but few strong points as well) with its django-multilingual, and here it comes Cake with its toolkit for multilingual applications. Comparing with few Java frameworks + CodeIgniter, I'm pretty aware of using locale-based apps with few languages for dynamic content. It's ugly as hell most of the times. The beauty of Cake is mostly its… Continue Reading
Last update on

Investing In Your Software Engineering Professional Development

I spent 3 years teaching Java at the high school I graduated at. I was used to technical training courses for organizations that had already adopted Java, as well as paid courses with students who were really passionate about Java. The high school gig was different. Students had a dozen other disciplines to prepare for! It was their senior year as well. Some of them were already employed as junior developers and rarely attended classes. Others were aiming for a job in a different field - front-end development, Python, Ruby. Needless to say, their commitment was diverse. How Software Engineering Curriculum… Continue Reading