by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

The Lost Art of Simplicity – My Take on Josh Holmes’ Brain

Any time someone stands up and says “y’all are doing it wrong” I take notice. Then I usually lose interest. But if that person starts to resonate with my own experiences, particularly my own frustrations, then I start to take it seriously.

I have been following Josh Holmes for a little while and he has a talk he started last year called the Lost Art of Simplicity. I took notice. But I never lost interest. His basic spiel is that we developers make complex solutions for simple problems. Nothing surprising right? Except that he attributed it to ego. Ouch. But is that true? Have you ever met a software architect?

  READ ARTICLE
749 words ()
by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Best Practices – Part 2

I just got out of Matthew and Lorna’s tutorial on Best Practices and my mind is swimming with all of the things I want to try. So, pretty much a normal day for me. Part 1 can be found in the related links on the right hand side.

Part 2 is basically more of the same; a list of all the things you’re not doing but probably should.

Let’s start with documentation.

End User Documentation

  READ ARTICLE
1132 words ()
by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Introduction to MongoDB

Today was the first day of the TEK conference tutorials. These are generally about 3 hours in length and dive into a given topic a little deeper than what you would typically get in a session. The biggest problem is that you can usually only go to one. Theater hopping, in this case, means that you end up getting less entertained.

There were 3 topics that were given.

Building a Zend Framework application

Converting Your MySQL App to NoSQL with MongoDB

Bad Guy For a Day: A Websecurity hands-on tutorial

  READ ARTICLE
917 words ()
by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

Best Practices – Part 1

I am in the middle of Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Lorna Jane Mitchell’s talk on PHP Best Practices and after the 3 pages of notes I took in the first hour I wanted to get some things down on virtual paper before getting too far into it. There is a lot of information that they’re giving out.

Source Control

The first thing they talked about was Source Control. Unfortunately, I was doing my writeup on MongoDB and I missed a bunch of stuff. That said, there were two things that I had time to write down.

  READ ARTICLE
1180 words ()
by Kevin Schroeder | 12:00 am

TEK-X – What I’m excited about

This year wil be my first time going to TEK-X and I will be attending as a member of the press. Therefore, I need to write press-like things. Lucky for you, I really don’t know how to. Instead, I will be talking for the next week about experiences, observations and such. But since I’m writing this from my office and not Chicago it is clear that I am not there. So what I wanted to do was write about some of the features that I am excited to see.

  READ ARTICLE
942 words ()