David Winterbottom

I am totally reliant on my bash aliases and readline configuration.

I’m a big fan of using PHPUnit with console colours turned on (using the --colors option).

At various PHP conferences and meetups over the last few weeks, I’ve seen attention drawn to the Data Mapper design pattern.

The presentation I gave at Confoo 2011 is now available online, there is feedback on joind.in.

A bad joke told in Python: def call_foreign_api(str): try: foreign_api(str) except NotUnderstoodError: foreign_api(str.upper())

I’m a big fan of Value Objects - some of the most useful classes I’ve ever written have been lightweight wrappers around strings.

Ever wanted to use mysqldump to dump tables that match a wildcard pattern?

Definitely tricker than you might think.

As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me Ensuring mistakes aren’t repeated is a commonplace activity for any development team.

From “Javascript: the good parts”: It is rarely possible for standards committees to remove imperfections from a language because doing so would cause the breakdage of all of the bad programs that depend on those bad parts.

One difficulty working with a shared in-house framework is it is difficult to maintain a common javascript file that is valid across multiple applications.

Based on the success of a highly tongue-in-cheek ad for a project manager, we recently experimented with a similar approach for finding developers: a job ad written in PHP.

Deploying applications that depend on cron-jobs can be a pain.

Have just been writing an FAQ page for commandlinefu.com.

Learning Ruby or Python from the command-line prompt is greatly enhanced by the built-in inspection methods these languages provide.

Finally got around to setting up continuous integration for some of the projects that comprise the day-job.

Just stumbled across a gem of a question whilst idly browsing Stack Overflow: Design a function f, such that: f(f(n)) == -n where n is a 32-bit signed integer; you can’t use complex numbers arithmetic.

A quick Phing tip that’s made my life easier when deploying new versions of commandlinefu.com.

Getting <www.commandlinefu.com> off the ground has renewed my interest in Bash, UNIX and all things command-line.

If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time at the UNIX command-line manipulating the filesystem, configuring Linux, playing with services and so forth.

Another day, another new Phing task; again integrating with project management software - this time the excellent Unfuddle.

At Tangent Labs, we’re currently experimenting with integrating Twitter into our project workflow to provide a latest activity feed in a easily digestible format (for both developers and non-technical people).

Deploying applications to shared hosting environments can be a pain when no SSH access is provided.

Following some server monitoring advice from the excellent ‘Building Scalable Web Sites’ by Cal Henderson, I’ve recently been experimenting with Ganglia on a cluster of servers at Tangent Labs.

High Performance Web Sites (HPWS) is essentially a book-length exposition of the YSlow extension to Firebug augmented with case studies of popular US websites.

It’s well known that MyISAM tables are prone to corruption and need to be regularly checked and repaired.

It’s sometime useful to interact with cookies directly on the client-side using javascript.

The Apache module mod_rewrite is capable of some very cool stuff.

When creating large XML files with PHP, there are some important considerations to bear in mind with regards to scalability.

Just a quick tip on monitoring the queries that mysql is handling on a production site.

UNIX is a majestic onion of discovery.

Overview This article is a guide to constructing a decent parent file for a thesis or dissertation compiled in Latex.

I wrote a tutorial on the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation as a set of simple HTML pages.