I am someone who spends large portions of their time working in weakly typed languages. Namely, PHP and JavaScript. I argue that static analysis is a must-have when working with any weakly typed language. It is nearly impossible to make reliable code without it.
Static analysis makes up for the mi…
There's been a fair deal of hubbub in the community about version numbers, including what is and isn't Semantic Versioning, what qualifies as a breaking change and how to use version numbers.
Underscore.js released a second digit "minor update" that was actually a breaking update for some people. T…
Lost in the shiny new features (see: namespaces and closures) PHP 5.3 also added the __invoke method. While not plainly apparent, it is secretly an amazingly useful 'magic method' .
If you're not taking advantage of __invoke, you should be. Why? It provides a uniform execution points for objects t…
Grid Style Sheets Must Die
I have been aware of Grid Style Sheets for quite a while, but I long ago dismissed them as a fad like CSS Resets. Recently though it came to my attention that OSCommerce 2.3 switched to the 960 Grid Style to replace its table based layout system. I spend most of my deve…
With Google recently starting to involve load time in search rankings, there has been a lot of talk about GZIP. Google Webmaster Tools exclaims "Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by XKB:". Many people listen to this, and go out looking for a quick fix…
I don’t want anyone take this the wrong way. I love JSON. It is so much simpler to parse than XML, and is an all around exceptional way to represent data. I have one caveat though, and that is “JSON with Padding” or “JSONP” as it goes by.
Building this site I wanted to bring in images from my Flick…
