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Ignore Whitespace Not Available in BitBucket Pull Requests

When looking for an online location to use as the host for source code, many people by default look at GitHub , as it seems to be the most well-known option out there, and is free for open source projects. However, if you would like your source code to be kept private, or would rather use Mercurial instead of Git, GitHub may not be the place for you. Instead, I would suggest BitBucket as your source code repository provider.

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Always Use Automated Integration Testing

QA or Quality Assurance of a software project is often the area of software development that is most neglected. Typically developers avoid software testing like their lives depended on it. While a basic level of testing is required for a single scenario to validate that your code “works”, the level of testing that is required to ensure that all users have a good user experience across all targeted platforms is something that a developer seems to think is beneath them.

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AddThis Can Cause Your Site To Not Load

Over the last few days, I have run across quite a few websites that seem to never finish loading. After waiting for 20 seconds or more, I give up, realizing that whatever content was on the site wasn’t worth it anymore for me to stare at a blank white browser until it loaded however much longer. Unfortunately for those websites, they are losing traffic that they will never get back.

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== and === in JavaScript and HTML Input Elements

If you read any current information about best practices in JavaScript, you will typically find the following advice somewhere in the list of things to do. Always use === and !== while avoiding == and != While I will never argue against this advice, there are a few things that a developer shoule realize when using === and !== instead of == and !=. === and !== first do a check of the data type of the two objects you are comparing.

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Always URL Encode your Cookies

One of the things that you tend to forget about when dealing with websites that typically only cater to English-speaking visitors is how to properly deal with Unicode throughout the site. It turns out that some browsers handle Unicode support in different sections of the browser differently. For instance, it turns out that when you want to store Unicode data as the value in a cookie, your success may vary across browsers.

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Orphaned Attribute Data in Magento

Its always entertaining to look at the source of an application that originates from outside your organization. It frequently highlights ways of using technology I was not familiar with beforehand, and sometimes leaves me shaking my head in disgust. I initially started looking at a relatively new third-party module thinking that I would find some sort of major bug that was causing the issues the site was experiencing, but was surprised to find that was not the case.

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Code Style Guides - Consistency is King

There have been countless flame wars online about the details of the guidelines that appear in various Code Style Guides. Some of the most famous are the tabs versus spaces arguments, whether or not to put curly brackets {} each on their own line, whether you should even use the curly brackets {} for one line actions in if statements. I am here to say that the only thing that matters in the style of your source code, other than syntactically correct code, is consistency.

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Defensive Development Failure

In the past, I have argued that devensive development is a useful tool to ensure unexpected exceptions are not introduced into a piece of software as well as ensuring that the error conditions are handled in an appropriate manner. Unfortunately, if defensive development is implemented poorly, it achieves none of its goals and can cause errors and exceptions to occur. One example that I found while reviewing some code recently is below:

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5 Ways to Do SCRUM Poorly

As a developer that frequently leads projects and operates in various leadership roles depending on the current project lineup, the Agile development methodology is a welcome change from the Waterfall and Software Development Life Cycle approaches to software development. SCRUM is the specific type of Agile development that I have participated in at a few different workplaces, and it seems to work well if implemented properly. However, there are several ways to make a SCRUM development team perform more poorly than it ought.

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5 Ways To Do Responsive Web Design Poorly

Responsive Web Design is a website design methodology that seeks to adapt the way a website is displayed depending on the capabilities of the device that is displaying the site. Frequently Responsive Web Design is used solely to adapt to the screen resolution of various devices, but it has other applications that are yet to have full browser support, such as delivering smaller graphics automatically for low-bandwidth connections, etc. As with everything, some people do it well, while others, well, they do it poorly.

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