A friendly framework reminder A friendly framework reminder

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.


In actuality, this is one of the reasons I started to blog.� Every time I'm at work and accomplish something that I haven't done before or learned a new little trick, I will send myself an email reminding me to blog about it later.� I don't always get to it right away, but I try as soon as I can so I don't forget!

The fact that my team members still need coaching on a regular basis, I thought I would write a brief article about it to encourage everyone else.

Something that will help you remember and provide you a lot of useful information is to maintain a document or "knowledge base" of code snippets that you've used.

The most important things to capture are the following:

  • Brief title describing what it is
  • Brief description of how you used it, if it's obvious this can be optional
  • Example code
  • Example output, again another optional one, but could be useful for things difficult to explain
  • Where you used it

The last item is something we often omit, when in reality it can be the most important one.� I don't know about you, but many times I remember myself saying, "Oh yeah, I've done that before on..." and I draw a blank as to where it was.� I will often remember, but it would be a lot easier to write it down in an organized fashion and not worry about it again.� I have enough on my mind, I don't need to remember where I've done every neat, little piece of code too!

If you have some ideas to help encourage people to use a framework to it's fullest, feel free to share, I always love hearing other people's opinions and success stories.

Published on Apr 1, 2009

Tags: CakePHP Tutorial | frameworks | Theory

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