A tale of creativity, passion, and good wine
Christopher Pitt asked a simple question: Can a developer be called a creative?
I am talking about whether systems architects or PHP developers (like me!) can be called a creative, even though we predominantly deal with code, and our grasp of colours, layout and iconography is limited to the unicode characters we appropriate for console and log messages.
To be honest it never crossed my mind that programming was anything but a creative pursuit, and I’m happy to call myself an artist to anyone that will listen, but I understand why civilians (non-programmers) could see things differently.
A girlfriend once…
On Coming Full Circle
The first year:
The second year:
How to Escape a Horror Movie Monster
I grew up being a big fan of horror movies. I enjoyed them all; from big blockbuster movies, to unheard of indie flicks, and there’s one type of scene all horror movies have in common: The young heroine manages to escape from the masked killer’s dungeon, and breathlessly makes back to her car. After fidgeting with her keys for what seems like an eternity, she finally gets the door open. She’s almost home free! After spending another minute panicking and dropping the keys on the floor, she finally gets the right key into the ignition. But it’s too late! All…
The Forgotten Debugging Tool
Assertions. You've probably heard of them, but have you ever used them? Not the ones you find in unit testing frameworks like PHPUnit. I mean, have you ever used the PHP assert() function?
From the PHP manual:
assert() will check the given assertion and take appropriate action if its result is FALSE. If the assertion is given as a string it will be evaluated as PHP code by assert(). The advantages of a string assertion are less overhead when assertion checking is off and messages containing the assertion expression when an assertion fails. …
Sean Hickey
A funkadelic coding monk on the path to engineering nirvana.
