How (not) to become a programmer
I recently answered a question on Quora: > Is it true that programming is not for everyone? And thought I'd elaborate my take on this here..
programming
A collection of 26 posts
Sync Vim Config Across Workspaces
As a Vim newbie, I'd like my Vim plugins & configuration to stay in sync between machines at home, office, my servers & a laptop. If found that a (free) Dropbox account wo...
Learning Vim
In an attempt to familiarize myself with the unfamiliar, I decided to build a fun side-project in Ruby and Vim. Effectively learning a new language, framework, and editor. Coming...
Running Ruby on Rails on Nginx
If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspe...
Notes on Dutch PHP Conference 2010
Here the notes I took during the Dutch PHP conference 2010 (#dpc10). They're not a representative summary of the event's highlights cause I could only attend 1 of 4 talks at any gi...
CakePHP REST Plugin Presentation
At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, et...
Generate HTML With PHP
Hi. Have you met KvzHTML? It's a standalone PHP Class for generating HTML. It's been hiding deep inside the caverns of my secret GitHub repo: kvzlib - a collection of code snippe...
Svn to Git
Today I've moved all of my SVN repositories over to GitHub. 5 private reps and 4 public ones. Two of which you may know: PHP.JS and System_Daemon.
Prepare for PHP 5.3
PHP 5.3 is a big leap forward for PHP and brings of a lot of neat features. However, big leaps can also mean big changes and potentially big breakage when it comes to backwards com...
Notes on CakeFest 3
Looking back at a great CakeFest in Berlin, I learned a lot about CakePHP and met many nice and inspiring people. Here are some conference notes I took that where particularly usef...
Create Youtube-Like IDs With PHP/Python/Javascript/Java/SQL
IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very lengthy. For computers that's OK. But human beings...
Install the Best Coding Font
If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very...
7 Steps to Better PEAR Documentation
If you've written a PEAR package, it's probably a good idea to submit some end user documentation. Here's how to do it.
A DRY Piece of Cake
So I've been learning CakePHP the last few days. Bit by bit I've been trying to port a lecagy admininistration app to Cake. 'Secretly' linking menuitems to finished Cake parts as w...
Create Daemons in PHP
Everyone knows PHP can be used to create websites. But it can also be used to create desktop applications and commandline tools. And now with a class called System_Daemon, you can...
My New IDE: NetBeans
Writing code requires two important things: creativity & discipline. The creativity to create the unknown, unexplored, exciting parts of software. And the discipline to create...
org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap
One error that has bugged my Eclipse PDT for a long time, was _org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap $DelegateEObjectContainmentEList. _A vague error, not much to go on, not many hi...
Rescuing my Messed Up Eclipse
Hi folks. As you may or may not know, I have a love/hate relationship with my IDE: Eclipse PDT. For times and times we get along well. But once every while it gets messed up, and i...
How Virtualization Will Improve Your Code
Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do wit...
Virtualization Compared
Recently I've been experimenting with Virtual machines for my development environment. The goal was to create a Virtual Machine that resembles our main production server, and have...
PHP Recursive str_replace: replaceTree
Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often th...
PHP Recursive ksort: ksortTree
Working With Trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often th...
My New IDE: Eclipse PDT
I've been programming a lot with Quanta which is a leightweight kdevelop based IDE. It did the trick for quite some time, but recent developments in my coding life like SVN brought...
Better Performance With mod_deflate
I used to use Dean Edwards Javascript Packer a lot to compress my Javascript sources. Libraries of 100kB could easily shrink to 30kB and that saves load times & bandwidth. A go...
PHP: tiff2pdf
Or: How to convert multipage TIFF to PDF in PHP.
Convert Anything to Tree Structures in PHP
I recently faced a programming challenge that almost broke my brain. I needed to create a function that could explode any single-dimensional array into a full blown tree structure,...