Category: Development

Last update on

Project-base, Support and Salary

  During my couple years of work as a PC techy support guy, administrator, company hired developer and freelancer, I've finally separated three different types of work: project-base, support and salary. Project-base This is a popular way of working in USA and Europe. The client has a task to be performed by an expert. Therefore the employer seeks for an appropriate guru to fulfil the one's requirement. Simple as that. What are the major characteristics of project-base work? fixed requirements usually short-term or medium-term fixed price for the whole project or different phases Focusing on the broader perspective, a freelancer could be hired… Continue Reading
Last update on

Digital Signatures And PDF Signing

I am working on a project that requires PDF signing through a website. The current infrastructure includes Apache + PHP website available. What we need to achieve is integrate the digital signature module of a user visiting the website and sign the required files. One of the most appropriate solutions after the negotiations was signed applet that signs PDFs. The steps for the project creation are the following: Create an applet Create a certificate to sign the applet via keystore tool (if root CA's are not available) Sign the applet (allowing read/write access to users' hard drives) Create a REST implementation that could read/write to… Continue Reading
Last update on

How To Create Unique Passwords For Every Site And Remember Them Easily?

In general It's an algorithm that could be applied almost everywhere and requires no special skills. First of all, lets define the cons and pros for you so to be able to chose whether you would get the advantage or not. Cons depends on the particular site at some point (changes dependant) requires few seconds for thinking (depends on complexity of your own algorithm) Pros absolutely and undoubtedly unique algorithm. The base is clear, the implementation is on your own. could be extended or tuned if needed - flexibility is everything no need of keystore or Internet connectivity hardly guessable if… Continue Reading
Last update on

The Business-IT Industry Relationship

The WordPress platform allows for a number of users to build business ideas over a number of options. Browsing online or offline (at a WordCamp or a regular WordPress meetup event) we could get in touch with WP developers, designers, writers, system administrators, support engineers and other technical. On the other hand, small teams are managed by WP managers and team leaders, CTOs and CEOs of WordPress-driven companies, financial managers aware of different aspects correlated with the eCommerce activity status as well. So, by all means, we have a coherent and cooperative relation between managing and executive personnel, that is… Continue Reading
Last update on

Over-abstractionism

Coming from the JEE world, I was used to adding several layers of abstraction for high level enterprise projects. Even back then, I was trying to evaluate the necessity of some of the layers. PHP is an interesting language, currently the most popular scripting (or maybe any programming) language at all for web projects. Developed naturally for non-developers without OOP nature (added in the next versions), loading everything on every single request, it lacks the concept of a number of complex layers with enterprise design patterns. Most projects follow flat-hierarchy, simple and straight forward structure (PHP doesn't support multithreading as well)… Continue Reading
Last update on

Profile with Cachegrind

When it comes to larger projects than yet another WordPress blog, refactoring and additional memory optimization are required to move the project in the right direction. Cachegrind is a GPL profiler for applications. It simulates how the program interacts with the architecture - including cache layers from the standard configuration of the modern systems and the CPU cache types that are normally presented. This allows for profiling applications on a lower level, including: the time for calling a function/initializing an object/etc the number of calls for a given function stacktrace of calls And much more. In essence, it's a visual… Continue Reading
Last update on

Wijmo Widgets – jQuery UI based widgets

I was contacted by Packt Publishing to check out a small reference book on Wijmo Widgets. Since I've been playing with different JavaScript libraries and APIs over the last 2 years I decided to give it a try over the holidays. I was specific for the fact that I haven't tried Wijmo before and I'd gladly throw some hate here if it doesn't make sense at all to me. Before I start, as an Open Source advocate I'm obliged to say that the library is free to evaluate, but it's meant to be used in premium projects - i.e. paid… Continue Reading
Last update on

QA != Tester

Last Saturday I had one of those epiphany moments for something way too obvious, still too shocking for me at the moment of speaking. It was related to the QA process and the place of the QA role in the software industry. I got involved in a discussion on Saturday evening regarding several different technical specialties. There were three of us teaching classes at the Telerik Academy here. Trainees could end up as: developers, frontend engineers, support experts, QA guys etc. Not surprisingly for me, most people tend to lean towards the development department, i.e. trying to join the dev… Continue Reading
Last update on

Build Term Relationship after wp_insert_term

Working on a project with migrating some data to a WordPress database I got my long and precise script up and running, but the data wasn't visible in the taxonomy list view in the admin - only the parent term there, few pages of data calculated (pagination on), but no data other than the parent. Luckily I found a cache wiping solution by Matt Thiessen (major props to the guy) who replied that a DB cache wipe could help by deleting the children option for the taxonomy in the DB, in a similar way (snippet from the link): [php] wp_insert_term(… Continue Reading
Last update on

Periodic Table, my First Public Upload

Recently I found a link to an app that I've published online almost 10 years ago and as far as I remember, it's my first publicly available application ever, free for download: I'm definitely not proud with the overall end product or the code quality produced back then, but that's my first contribution to the free software initiative and I felt somewhat sentimental. The application was written in Visual Basic and it was a cheat sheet of the Periodic Table of the Elements, displaying various details for each element like the atomic number, temperatures of boiling or melting, density. It… Continue Reading