This morning, I gave a talk at TrueNorth PHP. The talk was aimed at explaining the basics of Cryptography as needed for the average developer. It is intended to give a high level understanding of cryptography and cryptographic techniques. So, with no further adue, here’s the slides:

Well, I know it’s been a while since my last post here. I’ve been keeping busy (but also working on some cool stuff for you all, when the time is right). I figured that it was worth while pointing out a few upcoming talks that I’m going to be giving and conferences that I’ll be attending.

Every developer who studies computer science (and most who haven’t) has heard the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out“ before. It’s such a logical concept that it’s almost beyond refuting. Almost. While the phrase still definitely holds true for some situations, it doesn’t hold for most. How can such a logical and straight forward saying lead us down the wrong path?

“Don’t Reinvent The Wheel” is a phrase that we hear used all the time in software development. Usually it’s used in the context where a library exists to do what the user wants, but they are writing their own. While the sentiment is usually correct, I can’t stand the implication of the phrase. Therefore, I can’t stand it when people use that phrase without understanding what it really means. Let me explain:

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve likely heard me use the term “N-Tier Architecture” before. Today’s question comes from Arno. He basically asked “What is this N-Tier Architecture thing you keep talking about?”… So, to answer his question, a N-Tier Architecture is one that uses more than one tier. Of course there’s more to it than that…

In this day in age, it seems that the community trend is completely and unequivocally trending towards the use of web application frameworks. So much so that the defacto first comment to someone asking how to do something seems to be “Just use a framework, and it’ll solve the problem for you.” While I completely understand why this is the case, I can’t say that I agree with it. And while I do believe that frameworks serve a purpose, I think that they are vastly over-used. Let me explain why…

In response to last week’s ask for questions, I received a number of questions that I’d like to address. Since it would only do the question justice to have a dedicated post for each question. So I’m going to try to do one post per week on a user-submitted question (probably on Wednesday, but no promises). This week’s question is a rather abstract one:

I’ve been learning a lot about service layers and managers and domain objects and one thing really confuses me. Why is MySQL being turned into a non-relational database? It has so much power, so much flexibility, but it seems like many programmers want to abstract it to the point of near uselessness.

Now, there are so many facets to that question that it’s hard to find a starting point. But let’s try:

I was asked an interesting question via email yesterday. The question is fairly simple. The answer, not so much… So, rather than reply in an email, I figured that I’d write a post about it instead. The question, simply stated, is: When comparing a float to an integer using ==, where does the conversion happen?

So, let’s begin…

One of the things that I see repeated over and over again is the simple question “What books should I read to become a better developer?“. Or “How did you learn about that?“. Or even “What does a coding standard matter?”… OK, so that last one was a bit of a sentinel question, but the point is clear. Where should you look if you want to read to improve your development abilities? Well, I figured I’d take a few pages out of my library and share which books worked for me, in order of significance. If you remember from a prior post, I indicated that you should choose concepts over implementations. This list should illustrate that.

This morning I was asked a question that took me by surprise: “Your examples for PasswordLib are in OOP style, how do I write it in procedural style”… This took me by surprise, because the examples actually are in a procedural style. So I felt that I should write a post about the real differences between OOP and Procedural coding styles. Hint: whether you use classes and objects or not has very little to do with the answer…