[X]aaS is great for proof-of-concept, rapid prototyping, and other quick turnaround development efforts; especially when they provide easy to use API endpoints. However, becoming over-dependent on these third-party vendors for you production systems can be a hidden liability to your product and business.
Continue reading...Web Dev
The hammer and the nail
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.
Continue reading...Why the CMS has given the CMS a bad name
CMS. Anyone in the web biz knows what this stands for: “Content Management System.” The problem is, these systems often don’t properly or efficiently manage content. As a result, CMS has become the new dirty word when it comes to solutions for providing content on the web – or anywhere else for that matter.
Continue reading...Common internationalization misses
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.
Continue reading...Why data portability matters
If you’ve been in the software industry long enough, you’ve heard the term portable bantered about as an ephemeral goal for all things constructed from zeroes and ones. Applications and services are primarily the focus of these discussions, but often one crucial component is overlooked.
Continue reading...Dipping my toes into Elixir
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…
Continue reading...CodeIgniter + Twig = Quick n Dirty ™
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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