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Developers: Are ORMs Worth the Headaches?
My friend and I were discussing several frameworks which led me to think about some of my preferences for different systems. Having worked with several ORM type of frameworks like Hibernate, ActiveRecord (Ruby On Rails), Zend and Kohana in addition to several in-house systems, my general conclusion is that most ORMs beyond simple CRUD and…
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The Learning Curve of Ruby on Rails
One major reason why I ended up picking Ruby on Rails as my next major framework to learn was how people have stated that building applications is pretty quick. Although there are frameworks for both Perl and PHP that are similar to Rails, I ended up doing a massive switch over in languages both as…
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Data Driven Development: The Mistake I Made By Moving Towards This
When I first started the industry of tech, I was indoctrinated by Oracle as my first database and ended up becoming more of a data driven developer as opposed to a requirements driven developer. I think this hurt my overall perspective since my focus for many years was almost exclusively on dealing with 3rd normal…
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Cool Stuff: Ruby on Rails, PyDev, William Gibson, Fantasy Writing and More
After putting down World of Warcraft for over a week, I decided to start looking into more productive uses of my time. Of course, the biggest thing right now is sending my mom to acupuncture. It takes out a good two days of the week but I do see a lot of progress, compared to…
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Domain Modeling: Why Most Architectures Suck at this Level
Ever notice that when you go to a company that supposedly uses an MVC structure, there’s an inevitable problem when it comes to controllers and models? Most people won’t fuck up the view section since even the lamest front end programmers know how to separate html from business logic. However, even seasoned backend developers tend…
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The Zend Framework: Problems with Controllers, Models and Domain Modeling
In talking with an ex-colleague, I realized that there’s a lot of confusion that takes place in these so-called MVC frameworks. What I’ve noticed is that many have different interpretations of what the Model-View-Controller looks like (typically only getting the view portion correct in implementation). Most controversy in architecture revolves around the Model and the…
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Message to Recruiters on PHP and Magento
The other day a recruiter tried to lure me into an opportunity for a Magento shop. I gave him a pretty high figure, which was partly me trolling him and me seeing how far he would play along. Not surprisingly, he retorted that the company in question had a ceiling quite below what I asked…
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The Best Code Written and Myth of Academia
Yesterday, I had lunch with some friends and two people mentioned that they lacked a proper college degree. Somehow they felt that having a proper college degree has hurt them in some way. While that part might have some truth, it’s not the whole story. The conversation led me to de-construct the notion of academics…
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Magento, OnePica and Amazon S3 Configuration
I’m using Magento on Amazon EC2. Part of the infrastructure that I’m going to be using is Amazon S3 to handle user uploaded content and OnePica will manage it. My version of Magento is 1.7. At the moment, OnePica is not officially supported on Magento 1.7 according to the download link. However, my coworker pointed…
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Amazon EC2 Load Balancer: Out of Service Message
Let’s say you’re setting up a load balancer for your instances in Amazon’s EC2. After you create your load balancer and assign it your instances, you may see on the Health Check tab “Out of Service”. The way you get rid of it is by clicking on the “Edit Health Check” link. Inside, you will…