The VP Geek Speaks

How do you handle a developer that doesn't play by the rules?

Software development teams are fickle groups. It seems everyone has their own pet peeves that set them off, and a group that is cohesive and functioning well can quickly turn into one that shows little output for the time spent working.

In order to create and nurture a software development team takes leadership that understands all of the idiosyncrasies of their team members, and ensure that no one member derails the rest of the team. While some may use this as a way to discriminate against entire groups of people, if done properly, should only be utilized to maintain harmony after all hiring and performance decisions have been made.

SCRUM Sprint Planning Gone Wrong

One of the things that is a hallmark of the SCRUM method of Agile development is that you have a unit of time during which you commit to accomplishing some amount of work before that unit of time has elapsed. In order to commit to how much work should be accomplished during the “sprint”, all members of the team meet at the beginning of each sprint for a sprint planning meeting.

Handling Callbacks with a Depth-First Tree in JavaScript

One of the hardest things to do in JavaScript when working with complex data structures and a callback oriented platform is to know for sure when all of your callbacks have been fully executed. This issue came to light when working with a MongoDB datastore that was being used to store an infinitely-deep nested menu structure.

This menu structure could be visualized as being a tree. In order to get the all of the needed menu items from this tree, a depth-first traversal of the tree was determined to be the easiest to track. Since I typically try to write the least amount of code possible to solve a problem, I started out with a set of simple callbacks that worked perfectly as long as there was only one menu-item that had any children. As soon as I had multiple children to traverse, the timing of the execution of the final callback happened well before it should have as well as occurring again at the correct time, causing some unexpected results.

Don't Use MongoDB For The Wrong Things

The early phases of a greenfield project always seem to conjure up grand ideas of how to use the hottest new technologies to accomplish your goals. Many times, these grandiose plans give way to a more level-headed design discussion where more realistic technologies are adopted. However, there are a few times where the developer with the idea to use the hottest new technology is the one in charge, and ends up getting his way.

Write Your Own Compass Mixin

As a developer working with CSS, one of the things that I find a bit troubling is the amount of style definitions that I have to repeat over and over to achieve the design I desire. One of the basic tenets of software development is to utilize the DRY principle, otherwise known as Don’t Repeat Yourself. Fortunately, when you implement Compass and SASS in your project to generate your CSS, you have a way to avoid copy-paste programming.

Social-Buttons.Com Spams Google Analytics

Typically when you see traffic in Google Analytics, you can be sure that it is legitimate traffic to your website. However, there are a few known spammers out there that successfully spam Google Analytics tracking codes with bogus visits, hoping that the Analytics users visit the site that is supposedly “referring” traffic. One such domain that is being used for this is Social-Buttons.com.

I have just begun to see traffic in Google Analytics from Social-Buttons.com in the middle part of March 2015, and if you look at the Google Trends statistics for search terms of Social-Buttons.com, you can see that there is a spike in searches for Social-Buttons.com in March 2015 from a baseline of 0 searches prior to March 2015.

Using The Ampersand With Compass

While much of working with Compass to generate the CSS for your site is straightforward, there are a few ways to use Compass the provide great power, but are not as easy to understand at first glance. This article discusses one such way, hopefully making it easier to understand.

The operator that we will be looking at first is the & operator. The & as part of a selector in Compass allows you to take the entire selector string at a higher nesting level than the & currently resides upon, and replace the & with that selector string. Typically, when this precedes a selector with a space between the & and the selector, it would operate normally as if the & were not present. However, if you remove the space, it allows you to select elements with multiple classes assigned to them as part of a single selector token.

Compass Makes Writing CSS Fun Again

One of the things that has always annoyed me about web development is that writing CSS generally becomes a task that has a major lack of the features that you would expect in a programming language, even one as simple as JavaScript. These features that would be wonderful to have when working with CSS are the ability to use variables to define a set of basic colors that are in use across the site in one place, and then use the variable name throughout the stylesheet.

Optimize Wide To Narrow

If you consider the path that a user takes through your website from landing page to successful conversion, you can think of the number of users that make it to each point along the way to a successful conversion as similarly shaped to that of a funnel. In a typical setup, you may have a very small percentage of your users make it to a successful conversion, but there are several areas along the way that either improve the chances the user will convert or decrease those chances.

2 Ways To Find Current Directory in PHP Without Regular Expressions

There comes a time when you need to find the current directory in PHP, test to see if it is the directory that you expect it is, and take an action based on the test results. Obviously, the easiest way to get the current working directory in PHP is getcwd(). However, parsing the output of this function can provide some interesting challenges.

While it is trivial to do this sort of search with a Regular Expression, I tend to look for a solution that is easier to understand its functionality without reaching for the reference books. As a result, I would typically use one of the two methods below. One thing to note is that in each scenarion, any directory name in the path will match, not just the current directory. This can be easily updated to only match the single current directory the script is executed from.