The hammer and the nail

Categories Programming, Web Dev

Quite possibly one of the most-quoted phrases in the software industry:

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

— Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (1966)

This is often pulled out and dusted off when discussions of high-level architectural components, stacks, and programming languages begin to get a bit heated.  This post was inspired by a discussion with a budding computer scientist I know regarding why there are so many different programming languages, tools, and environments.

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Common internationalization misses

Categories Web Dev

With the world becoming more and more connected, with better support for global users and global businesses, globalization (g11n), internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) are more commonly being viewed as functional requirements vs nonfunctional ones.  Everyone is focused on supporting RTL layouts, date-time formats, and translations.  But here are some commonly-overlooked internationalization challenges that nearly every site build misses on the first try.

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Dipping my toes into Elixir

Categories Elixir, Web Dev

So I recently (finally) decided to take the plunge and take a serious look at Ruby and Rails, so started pinging a colleague of mine who spends most of his day pounding around on a custom Rails app.  After a couple weeks or so of setting up environments, digging through books, and plowing through the Ruby Koans, he asked me if I’d heard of a new language called Elixir and the Phoenix framework that has been creating quite a stir in Ruby circles…

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CodeIgniter + Twig = Quick n Dirty ™

Categories Web Dev

In full disclosure, I’m not completely new to CodeIgniter, having built a few freelance projects using the 2.x framework in the past due to it’s speed, flexibility and well-rounded core. It provides a great jumping-off spot for basic PHP-based projects that can benefit from a MVC framework without all the cruft you find in things like CakePHP, Laravel, and Symfony. Another selling point is that in several framework shootouts, CodeIgniter consistently comes in with faster non-cached response times.

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Search API + Acquia Solr; A Tale Of Alters

Categories Drupal

So, say MuhmadEmad you have built a great custom search solution for Drupal on top of Solr using Search API. You don’t want to lose it, so you export the entire config using Features, right? No-brainer…

Oh, wait – the client wants to host on Acquia and wholesale NFL jerseys use their Solr service. Sure, there’s a module for that as well.

But… How do you properly adapt your exported settings to work on Acquia without having to create a whole duplicate server and wholesale MLB jerseys index config?

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