End Your If

Last night was the premiere of my current favorite TV show “How I Met Your Mother”.  If you are not familiar with the show, former childhood star Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser), plays a character named Barney Stinson.  Barney is known for several catch-phrases as well as special high fives.

Borrowing some of the more popular high fives, I have created a top five high fives for developers.

Without further adieu, let’s begin the countdown. More »

Today’s article is going to discuss my top 5 ways to gain new traffic, did I mention that they are all FREE! Because each are free, they all take a few minutes of work on a regular basis. After a short while, you should hopefully gain a following and not require doing them anymore.

The top 5 reasons are:

1. Submit your content to social network sites
2. Share your content with article directories
3. Create a Twitter following
4. Submit to Blog Carnivals
5. Comment on other relevant blogs or forums

More »

Quite often at work, I find myself reminding my team members to be sure to ALWAYS utilize the framework to it’s fullest.  Just because you are unsure how to do something or have never done it before in the framework, does NOT mean that it cannot be done!

I use to have this thinking as well.  I would curse and curse, I’ve done this a 100 times, why is it so difficult to do with this framework!

Once I calmed down, I would Google it or look around the documentation and pretty quickly discover how to accomplish it using the framework.  9 times out of 10, I found that it was actually extremely easy to implement.  Not only that, 7 or 8 times out of 10, it would actually save me time!  If it didn’t the first time, it certainly always saved me a lot more the next time. More »

Sick days?  What’s a sick day?  I know at my place of work, we don’t take them.  Today is a great example of that.  I couldn’t even get out of bed yesterday, Sunday, but today, with work knocking on the door, I got up nice and early, popped some medication to get me through the day and here we are 9 hours later at home blogging!

Today’s article, won’t contain anything informative, just a message to other web developers out there like me, who feel like crap on the weekend, but still get up to work on Monday.

Sometimes, I’d actually take the day off, but today, like many days, I had to move a web site live.  I knew if I stayed home and asked someone else to do it that it would be more stressful than not going in!

So, to all you other web developers, you know what, let’s not just limit to web developers, to all you other courageous people who get up in the morning, feeling like garbage, but still go in to work, CHEERS!

I’m hoping to be back tomorrow to blog another day.

About two years ago I started learning AJAX and drag and drop.  The first project I applied it to was an existing project that was using Prototype and Scriptaculous.  So, I didn’t really have a choice as to what library I was going to use.

Two years later, I do not know Jquery all that well, but I am absolutely falling in love with.  Doing things with Jquery seem to be 10 times easier to me.

I always struggled with the each() function that I seemed to be constantly using with Prototype.  Jquery seems to understand this and simplify things for us.

In this article, I’m going to describe my top reasons why I am becoming a Jquery lover over Prototype. More »

During my first job interview as a web developer, I was asked, what I thought at the time, a weird question.  “Jamie, on a scale of one to ten, what would you score yourself in regards to attention to detail?”  I said what every employer wanted to hear “eight or nine, no one is perfect”.

It was enough to get me the job.  However, as I completed task after task, it was clear that my attention to detail was more around a five or six.  This was a contract position at the time with a possible extension, well as you can guess, I didn’t get the extension.

So what’s changed today?  The obvious answer is a lot, but let’s breakdown things I now do differently to increase my attention of detail to the actual eight or nine I originally said it was. More »

So, you are looking to become a better web developer?  Well, the fact that you are willing to read this article is a great start!  It’s actual one of my five tips.  I’ll begin by listing, what I believe, are the most important pieces in becoming a better web developer.

1. Test
2. Adapt
3. Think/Plan
4. Trial and Error
5. Ask for help

More »

Uggghh, I hate to even be writing about this!  I have been spending the past two days cleaning up a project that has been running for over one year.  It was our first ever CakePHP project at our company and we were too lazy to be consistent about using $html->link() when creating our links.

Just recently the client has requested a change for their Facebook application.  We simply need to add a “requirelogin” HTML attribute to every link. More »

I’m assuming I’m not alone with this one, but on a daily basis I seem to bring home a lot of stress from work.  At one point I use to bring home so much stress that I was unable to sleep at night.  From time-to-time it still happens, but with these techniques below I have been able to significantly improve the amount of stress I bring home from work.

Before we discuss resolutions, let’s discuss the type of stress us web developers/project managers bring home on a daily basis.

• Angry clients
• Your team members not performing well
• A mistake by you
• A bug that you were unable to find
• Too much work
• Mean boss
• Difficult co-workers

I’m sure this list could carry on a lot longer, but I think we get the point with HOW much stress we can bring home on a daily basis.

Let’s begin by breaking each one down. More »

Several times a week it seems, someone at my office is asking, “Jamie, should I use $this->element() or $this->requestAction()?”

Every time they ask, I ask them back, “What do you need to do?”

There are a few simple ways to determine if using an element is better or a request action is better. More »