Web-Development

The Scrum Daily Standup

One of the hallmarks of the Scrum method of agile software development is a daily meeting, or “standup”. The purpose of the Scrum Daily Standup is to make sure the Scrum team is aware of what tasks the other members of the team are working on as well as asking for and offering assistance to other members of the team as needed. The Scrum Daily Standup is NOT a meeting to gather the project’s status.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Another Micro-Optimization Provides Useless Results

One of the things to remember about performance optimizations performed in isolation is that their results are rarely representative of real-world performance results. This article outlines the “findings” of the students at a couple of Canadian universities, and comes to the conclusion that string concatenation in memory is slower than writing the same total number of bytes to disk, one after the other. String concatenation is a slow and CPU-heavy operation.

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Verify Magento User Access to Admin Functionality

When working with Magento, there will inevitably come a time where you need to manually check to see if the currently logged-in user has access to a specific piece of functionality as defined in the ACL settings. Personally, I have come across this situation more often when creating my own custom modules and their custom permissions, but they can be used to check the permissions of any module. As is so often the case, Alan Storm has documented the exact solution for this scenario.

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Laravel Removed The QuickStart For Version 5

To start out, I want to be clear that what follows should not be interpreted to be a criticism of the software framework that those that work on Laravel publish, nor an indictment of open-source software as a whole. Rather, it is a look at how some projects, open or closed source make it harder than it should be for new users/developers to utilize their terrific products. It seems experts conveniently “forget” the tips and tricks and tribulations it takes to learn a new technology, covering it all with, “It’s just so easy”.

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Google To Begin Rewarding Mobile-Friendly Websites

Google recently announced that beginning April 21, 2015, they would start slightly rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly at the expense of sites that are not. There are several things that Google looks at to determine whether or not a site is easy for a user on a mobile device to view and navigate. Some of the things that Google looks for include the following: Fonts that are big enough to be legible Users don’t have to scroll left and right to see content Links are big enough and have enough space around them to be clickable with a touch of a finger.

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Run Multiple Python mod_wsgi Websites With Apache On Windows

Yes, this sounds completely crazy, but there is a semi-valid need to do this, unfortunately. However, when you need to run multiple Python websites on Apache on Windows via mod_wsgi, it quickly becomes apparent that using the typical <VirtualHost> configuration options do not work as expected. When you try to do it with a <VirtualHost> configuration, you will be unable to setup a separate WSGIPythonPath configuration setting per virtual host, as that configuration directive is not allowed within a <VirtualHost> node.

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Top 5 Reasons To Test Your Website Across Browsers

I would hope that those of you taking the time to read this posting would have some idea of why you should perform some level of testing of the software and websites you create. However, I am keenly aware that some management types don’t always understand the importance of testing until an untested “feature” appears in the wild, frustrating all that run across it. Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility- Unless you develop a website for internal usage only, where you are able to successfully restrict users to a specific version of a specific browser, Cross Browser Compatibility ensures your site functions well for the greatest number of users.

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When Is Enough CSS Enough?

One of the major pushes in web development today is to try to do as much of the styling of a website as is possible from within the CSS of the site. The idea behind this is that when you do so, you remove styling responsibilities from your JavaScript and HTML content, resulting in a much better separation of concerns. The other aspect of this is that CSS styling is typically handled in a more native fashion in the browser as compared to what you can accomplish via Javascript.

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Google Code Shutting Down

Google just recently announced that they are going to begin the process of shutting down their Google Code project hosting service. In the blog post announcing that they were shuttering the service, they let it slip that even Google had quit using Google Code for their project hosting, instead transitioning thousands of their projects to GitHub. Google seemingly blames the fact that GitHub and BitBucket handle project hosting better than Google does as the main reason that they are discontinuing the service.

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Never Explicitly Trust Software Because It Is Open-Source

One of the major ideas behind open source projects is that allowing anyone that wants to view the source code of a project to be able to do so should make bugs and security weaknesses easy to find. While this did not work so well with OpenSSL and its various bugs that have been exposed recently, I do have an example where it worked extremely well. Magento is an eCommerce platform that has two separate editions.

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The Number 1 Cause of the Not Invented Here Syndrome

One of the quickest ways to get a new internal tool bootstrapped is to utilize an existing design, making slight adjustments to ensure the design matches the requirements of the current project. Instead of using another internal tool as the basis for the new design, I used a design that was purchased specifically for this project. This particular design was unique in that there were multiple working examples using AJAX, pure HTML, and AngularJS.

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Firefox 36 Has A Massive Memory Leak

While looking through our TrackJS logs the other day, I ran across a peculiar error message coming from Firefox 36 on Windows 7. The error message was simply out of memory. It seemed that the pesky local storage issue had reappeared mysteriously. However, with a quick check of the codebase, I verified that no one had accidentally reverted those fixes. With that possible cause ruled out, I turned to a developer’s best friend, Google, for solutions.

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Authenticate Magento Admin Users

Magento’s admin interface allows you to do the vast majority of everything that you would ever want to do to manage your eCommerce website. However, there are times when the rigidity of the framework makes it difficult for developers to appropriately customize a layout. One of the things that we have done to combat these limitations is to create a new administration section of the website specifically for the use of developers and other advanced administrators of the site.

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The Top Sign You Hired The Wrong Developer

I have been a part of the interview process at a few different companies now, and there is one thing that I have seen correlate completely with how useless a developer hire is. If the hiring manager ever brings me a resume that mentions how many conferences a candidate attends or gives talks at, I will immediately rule that candidate out for the purposes of the development position I am interviewing for.

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Don't Be a Dunce, Save Your Orders

There are some gotchas that you think that you will always see coming. One such gotcha is the need to save an object to the datastore to persist any changes you may have made to that object. While it seems like a reasonable concept at the base level, there are times that the need to save an object completely escapes your mind. It seems that for many non-developers, this occurs when they have been working a long time on a file, typically a Microsoft Word document, shortly before their computer blue screens, losing all of their work.

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Avoid 'Persistent storage maximum size reached' in Firefox

One of the nice tools out there for tracking down issues that your website’s visitors are having is TrackJS. We started noticing the other day that we were getting overwhelmed by errors with the text Persistent storage maximum size reached for our Magento site. When we looked further into the issue, it quickly became obvious that all of the errors originated from a single user that was running Firefox. It quickly became obvious that there was a single user that had exhausted their localStorage resources on their browser, but why was it only one user?

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Stop Wanting and Start Choosing

I am used to hearing people use phrases like “I want to be able to do X thing” or “I want to have X position at my company” when people are talking in generalities about their goals. I tend to do it often as well, especially when using “self-talk” to attempt to work on internal goals and desires. However, when reading a book from Paul Tough, How Children Succeed, one of the quotes that he references from Jonathan Rowson, a Scottish chess grand master who had written about the importance of emotion and psychology in chess success.

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Write Bulletproof JavaScript

While display issues have long been the bane of a web developer’s existence, current web development projects tend to have much more client side interactivity, focusing ever more attention on the reliability and resilience of the JavaScript you write to deliver the complete interactive experience. Many things can cause unexpected errors in your carefully crafted code. However, there are a few things that you can do to make sure that your site degrades gracefully and still provides a basic level of functionality when something in the browser goes wrong.

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JavaScript Can Have An Interesting Interpretation of Order

There is an interesting little quirk with the way in which JavaScript decides which function it should execute next. You see, while the JavaScript engine has a single thread of execution, it creates the illusion of multiple simultaneous processes running at once by utilizing a queue of functions to execute. This means that every time you make a call to a function in your JavaScript, there is no absolute guarantee that it will be the next piece of code run, as there may have been other events triggered that beat your custom function onto the execution queue.

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Let's talk about equality

Equality has been a major topic of discussion over the last few weeks. Whenever this topic comes up, I am always suprised how limited many people’s knowledge about true equality is. Relax everyone, I am talking about equality operators in JavaScript, and not the topic of national discussion recently. Thinking back to some interviews I have been a part of recently, it became extremely obvious how little most Front End Web Developers know about the JavaScript equaltiy operators.

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Top Job Applicants Never Stop Learning

From time to time, my job allows me to be a part of the hiring process for our technical positions. Unfortunately for some of the applicants, I repeatedly come away from these interviews amazed at the responses I get from pretty standard and basic technical questions related to Web Development. Recently we were looking for a front-end web developer that was good at UX and design and proficient at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

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Do you have too many big balls?

Managing a software development team can be a difficult task when everything is moving along exactly as expected. When you add in the paradigm shift of Agile Software Development with Scrum , management doesn’t always have the same insights into what makes up an efficient use of a development team’s time. For the rest of this post, lets assume that we are working with a 2 week sprint, with the first day half-used for sprint planning, and the last day half used for the sprint retrospective.

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Parallax Background Scrolling on Internet Explorer is Not Smooth

One of the pleasures of working on a website that is using some of the latest technologies is that you often run into strange compatability issues that only affect one browser or another, and many of the forums have little to no information about how to properly address the issues. Parallax scrolling is a technique that has been around for a while now, highlighted by Apple’s own iPhone 5s card-esque scrolling on their homepage, among others.

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Write Software for People, Not Computers

Throughout a normal day, I end up reading a lot of information about current issues in technology, and today is no different. There was a debate raging about whether or not high-level math was required for programmers that was sparked by this article by Sarah Mei Programming is not math . While it is an interesting topic, and, surprisingly, I mostly agree with Sarah on this issue, that is not the most important portion of her post.

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The Easiest Way to Create A Solution That Works

The easiest way to create a solution that works…is to do it right the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but it turns out to be an important factor to keep in mind when you are tempted to come up with a quick and dirty solution for a problem that does not follow established best practices and is likely to have code quality issues later. I have run across many sections of code that I or other developers have written in the past that we thought were “good enough” at the time it was written, yet, I was revisiting the code because we discovered a bug in it.

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Estimating Software Development Projects is Hard

As a software developer, working with non-technical management and end users to define a deadline for when a project will be ready to use or how long it will take from start to end of a project is an extremely complex task. Unfortunately, the non-technical audience thinks that it should be simple to give some sort of estimation on the fly without detailed analysis of the project and what it involves, as it seems simple for them to estimate tasks that are like ones they have done before.

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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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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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