CSS inliners

At the moment, I’m working with a company where I’m handling their email templates. One tool I found to be very useful are CSS inliners. I won’t be discussing Inky templates in this post. I’ve been using https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/tools/css-inliner/ and for the most part, it works perfect. The only down side is that I have to …

Perfection Paralysis

I’ve spent more than a decade in professional software development. I’ve seen and fought this demon time and time again. The demon’s name is Perfection Paralysis. It’s quite the beast. When you have so many eyes reviewing and critiquing your code, you want to be the best you can possibly be. You want your code …

Useful command to test speed of a container, vm, or system

I’ll be breaking down the following command part by part: time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1024 count=100000   What does time do? It runs a process and then captures how long it took to execute. What about DD? Well, it’s a command that copies data from a standard input to a standard output. What about the …

Amazon S3 Outage

Today’s post is regarding https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-breaking-things-for-a-lot-of-websites-and-apps/ These type of occurrences are becoming more and more common. Tons of company has placed a ton of faith into the Amazon ecosystem, and time and time again, it looks like Amazon has let them down. When these things broke, it broke at a MASSIVE scale (AWS outage knocks Amazon, Netflix, …

Hybris vs Magento

“We’re on Magento, but we need to upgrade to Hybris!” “Nothing is true, everything is permitted“ I went to magento.com and hybris.com and I took a look at two companies, and then did a benchmark on the two companies. Which of the following do you think is the “better” version?   The slower loading one is …

Only one way to do things? The cat would disagree

I had a discussion with an industry peer today, regarding databases. Two conclusions he arrived at, which are right, but also wrong. One, “strings have no business being in a SQL statement”, two, “IDs have no basis being in a mapping table”. From a peer data storage and efficiency perspective, you’re correct, but from a …

www subdomain or no www subdomain

This topic is a very old an ancient topic, but I’ve arrive definitively at whether or not the main domain should have www, or not. The answer is “it should”. The reason being, is that a cookie set at the domain level, exists for all subdomains. If you have subdomains, or ever plan to have …

Project Constraints and Project Selling

There are 3 things you can control about a project, time, resources, and features. Of the three, you at best can control 2. Which is why I propose for projects to have the following creation and definition flow: Feature gathering Resources / Budget constraints Time / Delivery constraints Project planning, project options, packaging, pricing Investigation …

Sell Reputation

The Greek philosopher Aristotle divided the means of persuasion, appeals, into three categories–Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Today, we’ll talk about ethos. When you’re trying to persuade a customer that your product is worth more than another person’s product, you will invoke one of the three. Substantial investment will be made mostly on the logos and ethos front. …