There is an old saying “A stitch in time saves nine.” What it means is that if there is an issue, if you address it early, it’ll take overall less effort than addressing it down the road. This is saying applies not only to stitch, but to programming as well. Employers should be wary of …
Author Archives: Jackson Leung
View Point on Frameworks
The way humans get computers to do what they want is through “programming” and we program in a “programming language”. In a way, it’s how humans communicate with a computer. When I program, it’s more like talking to a computer than anything else. Talking is what keeps me clothed, fed, and sheltered. In English, you …
Handling File Storage
When you’re writing a massive application, if given a choice to use a file manager to manage files or to allow the application to manage the files on its own, it’s much preferable that allow the application to handle the file placement logic. This way, the application’s database can be put in charge of maintaining …
Data Inside a Database
Data inside a database should always be post-processed and ready-to-use-as-is. If you can rely on the data provided by the database to be usable as is, then you’ll save yourself a lot of string processing work. Think about it this way, if you have a string, let say “orange” and it’s stored in the database, …
Feature Gathering
There is an important lesson to be learned from the jQuery versus PrototypeJS battle. While there isn’t really anything wrong with Prototype, jQuery is simply better. Yes, there are some pros and cons to either one, but to me, jQuery was simply better designed. It’s as if, one day, some guy decided to come up …
Zend MVC plus Smarty
I’ve been playing with both Smarty and MVC. I can’t help but feel that having both Smarty and MVC is a bit redundant. Smarty was developed so that people with little to no programming experience can be involved in the designing process through the use of templates. MVC is known as Model, View, and Controller. …
Get Your Hot Swapping On
There are many ways in which code is rolled out. I’ve noticed in the new environment I’m in, code roll outs are performed more in a “hot swap” fashion than an install / overwrite fashion. In an overwrite manner, code has been throughly tested in a dev and staging environment before being rolled out to …
Finding Problematic Code with Top and Mod Status
The first step to fixing a problem is figuring out that there is one. Top is great command to examine what’s going on your system. It can tell you how resource intensive a process is, how long it’s been running, who executed it, and etc. Through Top, you can see if a process like httpd …
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Unwritten Rules of Professional Web Applications
While there are many unwritten rules, here are few which I find most significant. To me, these are qualities of any professional web application. There should be no single point of failure The site should never be sluggish The site should never show any errors If the site is not available there needs to be …
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Back on Top
If you searched for my full name in Google for the past 3 weeks or so, you might have noticed that my site completely disappeared from the famous search engine. The reason it disappeared was probably due to my domain expiring and parked, but after 3 weeks of checking and waiting, it appears my site …