About

Andrew Culver, a web development manager, has been very busy this year and hasn’t made the time to update his blog. Shame on me.

Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

A PHP User Group in Hampton Roads

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Tonight I attended the first monthly PHP user group in the Hampton Roads area at Kelly’s in downtown Norfolk. There was plenty of conversation over dinner and Jeremy Fisher gave a short, sweet, and discussion-provoking introduction to namespaces and other features of the upcoming PHP 5.3. Everyone agreed that we’ll do the same thing […]

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Vespa: Refining Our Definition of MVC

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Bennett McElwee recently published an article titled “Vespa: A Better MVC“. As the title suggests, he presents his observations of the traditional understanding of an MVC structure and provides his own suggestions for how it might be improved. If this sounds interesting to you, I’d recommend you read the article.
Given it’s relevance to […]

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Ticketing System Emails

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Our ticketing system, Trac, spits out an email to everyone who has ever been associated with a ticket anytime anyone makes a change to it.  For me, on this team, it generates an enormous amount of email.
And I love it.  It’s great information.  It keeps me in the loop in a great way.  I set […]

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Ah, My Favorite Resource

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Just a brief one today, since my point is simple.  An email came in this morning with a link to a section of Martin Fowler’s Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and when I saw it, I got butterflies in my stomach.
The catalog includes brief summaries of many important object-oriented design patterns with some […]

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php|tek 2008 Recap

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

What a great week.
I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people with whom I shared a common perspective on the development of software.  Some of them stretched what I expect from myself as a developer and have helped me set new goals.  Even though I only came knowing one person at the conference, […]

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A Week in Chicago

Monday, May 19th, 2008

So, I’m in Chicago for the remainder of the week attending php|tek 2008. The conference is both business and pleasure, since work is paying my way but being here is significantly interesting on a personal level. I’ve really enjoyed developing in PHP even since that first project in which I was forced to […]

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Biblical Proverbs for Software Development

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

My wife and I read the Bible regularly and fairly systematically. As we were reading the eighteenth chapter of Proverbs last night, the following stood out to me as being relevant in the context of software development and team dynamics.
A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire;
He rages against all wise judgment.
A fool […]

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PHP’s Output Buffer

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Are you familiar with PHP’s output buffering? You should be. If you already are, you can disregard this post.
When we print, echo, provide inline HTML, etc., PHP’s default default behavior is to write to the standard output. Typically that means the web browser or terminal you’re using to execute the […]

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Method Chaining

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Are you familiar with method chaining? If not, the concept is very simple and you should at least understand enough to recognize when it’s being used. Consider the following example:

$select = new Select();

$select->columns(‘id, name’)->from(‘person’)->where(‘age > 25′);

Why? The purpose of the class author is to provide a fluid syntax and flexible interface […]

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Consistency

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

While a single complex accomplishment may earn my praise, simple expectations met with consistency will earn my trust.

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