Twice today I’ve seen references to the benefits of iterative improvement, and I found that the topic resonated with me. At the moment I’m halfway though a pretty lengthy software project in which it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. The backlog is substantial, resulting in a hefty set of tasks for [...]

Investigating the options for handling XHR exceptions when making AJAX requests to a Symfony2 application.

I’m working on a Symfony2 application which makes use of roles to manage what Users of the system are able to do within the app. Symfony places no limit on the amount of roles the User can have, but in the context of my application, there are only two – a base user (ROLE_USER, in [...]

A few times I’ve found myself cursing when trying to toggle XDebug on and off via Macports. Typically I’ll be debugging with it enabled, then disable it for development/testing to get the fastest experience possible (it tends to really impact performance on large codebases, such as a Symfony2 standard install), only to experience segfaults when [...]

I was having a nice, relaxing Saturday morning until I read through my Twitter timeline and was directed to Jeff Atwood’s latest post on Coding Horror, “The PHP Singularity“. After reading through it, and the comments from other readers, I got annoyed. Really annoyed. I won’t repeat the article, but the gist of it is: [...]

I’ve been asked a few times what the best resources are for learning Symfony2. With the project still relatively young there aren’t yet (to my knowledge, anyway!) any books (physical or otherwise) on Symfony2 available, but there is a good amount of information in the form of manuals and tutorials on the web to get [...]

If you think app development and football have nothing in common, read on. There was a discussion on our IRC server at work this morning which centred on how to best mitigate the risk involved with using third party tools in web applications. Not just at the code level, as in a JavaScript library like [...]

Step 1: Buy a Mac

I had a bit of a nightmare recently trying to get the ImageMagick PHP extension working on Windows. Builds of the extension as a DLL are provided by Mikko, which is awesome, but I had some trouble getting it to work. The workstation I was using was running 64-bit Windows 7N, and the issue I [...]

On the twentieth of November, 2011, the company for whom I work (Box UK) held a hackday in Cardiff at the Student’s Union. It was the first time that we’d organised such an event, but it seemed to go really well – feedback from the participants was good, it was well attended, and personally I [...]