Link Post: "A Dark Room" - What's it like to have a #1 App? With Amir Rajan

An interesting interview with a developer who had a #1 app in the paid section of the App Store. I found his numbers really interesting (1-2% of downloads create a review for the app) and the fact that he's been so open with his development process.

http://www.hanselminutes.com/444/a-dark-room-whats-it-like-to-have-a-1-app-with-amir-rajan

Link Post: Wikipedia's Work With HHVM

I keep seeing these amazing performance numbers with HHVM. I'm going to have to spend some time testing my sites with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-10-08/Technology_report

Link Post: Reddit’s crappy ultimatum to remote workers and offices

This just reeks of incompetence and lack of imagination. Instead of making it work with the guys and girls that helped get you there, instead of following in the footsteps of other progressive, distributed workforces, it’s the new Optimal-Teamwork-in-SF way or the highway. Instead of sharing the champagne, it’s “Hey, here’s a cold glass of water in your face.” We may look and sound like the fun guys of the internet, but we’ve got money now. Even if the main goal was to purge the existing Reddit workforce, the way they’ve gone about it is stomach curdling.

I'm a big fan of remote workers (all our programmers at Zimco are remote) and I think there is a huge benefit to having remote workers. For example, last week I went into the office and was interrupted by people at least once every half hour. I feel bad that Reddit feels that it needs to have all of it's workers under one roof and hopefully this won't backfire on them.

http://shortlogic.tumblr.com/post/99014759324/reddits-crappy-ultimatum

Link Post: if (osName.startswith("windows 9"))

The rumor is that Microsoft skipped version 9 because of code like this:

https://searchcode.com/?q=if%28version%2Cstartswith%28%22windows+9%22%29

via http://reddit.com/r/programming

Link Post: From PHP 5 to 7

An interesting history of PHP and why they're skipping version 6.

Here is a brief summary of the reasons outlined supporting the decision to release the next version as PHP 7:

• PHP6 already existed, and there are plenty of numbers available (so it's easy to make a new version number).
• It could confuse people since PHP6 was a widely known project, and this release is unrelated.
• There's lots of PHP6 information on the web which does not apply to this release.

http://halls-of-valhalla.org/beta/news/from-php-5-to-7,146/

PSA: Patch and Check Your Servers for ShellShock

Make sure you patch:

http://www.linuxnews.pro/patch-bash-shell-shock-centos-ubuntu/

and check your servers for access attempts:

http://www.linuxbrigade.com/bash-shellshock-bug-find-youve-tested/

Link Post: Making MySQL Better at GitHub

I think this is a good explanation on how to do an update.

https://github.com/blog/1880-making-mysql-better-at-github

Always Specify a Key When Using Zend_Cache

I've been using Zend_Cache for a while to improve performance on my sites and it has this cool feature where you don't have to specify the key when you perform the save. You end up with a lot of code that looks like this:

$key = 'permission' . $role->getId();
if(($permissions = $cache->load($key)) == false){
    $permissions = $this->someReallyComplicatedQuery();
    $cache->save($permissions);
}

This works really really well but then I started noticing some performance problem and random page failures on one of the sites I maintain. I started looking into the problems and I found some of these sections weren't actually saving the correct data so I started breaking down what exactly someReallyComplicatedQuery was doing only to find ANOTHER one of these blocks. It turns on the second call to $cache->load() was resetting the value and causing all the problem. So from now on I'm always saving using this form (actually I've rewritten all of these blocks on several of my sites):

$key = 'permission' . $role->getId();
if(($permissions = $cache->load($key)) == false){
    $permissions = $this->someReallyComplicatedQuery();
    $cache->save($permissions , $key);
}

Link Post: Before Debugging PHP That’s Not Working, Consult This List of 10 Common Mistakes

I'm amazed that some of these could be issues but "Performing queries in a loop", "Ignoring Unicode/UTF-8 issues", and "Ignoring coding standards" are common problems I see (and have caused).

http://www.toptal.com/php/10-most-common-mistakes-php-programmers-make

Link Post: Vertical align anything with just 3 lines of CSS

I'm leaving this here for my own reference but others my find is useful.

http://zerosixthree.se/vertical-align-anything-with-just-3-lines-of-css/