That's kind of a provocative title, so let me just get this out of the way: No, no they are not. And I am not crazy enough to attempt to convince you otherwise. That said, they aren't nearly as bad as they're given credit for.

Let's do this by way of example. Suppose you have a list, and users need to be able to sort it, alter the items in the ( Read more... )

Last night, while attempting unsuccessfully to acquire sleepytimes, I heard a loud bang. This was quickly followed by the fomf of the power going out, and a short while later by the beeping of battery backups now without power.

Naturally, the first thing I did was go to shut down my computers. My first hint that this was more than a nearby ( Read more... )

A few years ago, my friend Sparky got married. I took a ton of pictures, but until now, never actually did anything with them. So let's reminisce.
( All aboard the wedding train! )

While I am ostensibly a "full-stack" web developer, it's no secret that I'm not particulary fond of the front-end. In large part, this may be because the world seems to be full of bad front-end developers, who by and large are fantastic at building crappy versions of desktop apps inside a browser, but are incredibly bad at building things which ( Read more... )

A while back I made an attempt to use healthcare.gov to acquire health insurance. The experience was … unpleasant. Here are some things that irked me:
JavaScript

It's broken without JS. While this is incredibly common, it will always garner a complaint from me. If I am in a browser I do not want an "app-like" experience, I want a web-like ( Read more... )

One of the perks of being unemployed are that I have a reasonable amount of downtime again, so I've been spending some of it updating libraries which are under my care.

CL-FTP, which is pretty stable and incredibly niche (who uses FTP anymore, anyway?), has recently had a flurry of activity. Thanks to Kambiz Darabi for finding and fixing a bug ( Read more... )

• The Basic Problem
• The Method
• Inheritance Is… Uh… Missing?
• Clojure
• Go

Apologies for the short notice--I've been rushed just trying to get the darn thing ready--but I will be giving a talk at Iowa Code Camp on Saturday, November 1st.

If you can't attend, or want to review my talk before/after I give it, you can find it here. Feel free to offer any feedback. It's much too late to make major changes at this point, ( Read more... )

I was highly amused by the reactions to my previous post on the programming and php subreddits. So I spent a little time to isolate the typehint conversion optional argument issue.

It’s not me, it’s PHP. And frankly, I don’t understand the point of the backtrace going to the trouble of making things references if doing things with those ( Read more... )

Controller Methods

What we call a “controller method”, at least, is simply a function which is called on the web side via AJAX and returns some value back (generally either JSON or a snippet of HTML).

When I started at my current employer, controller methods looked like this:

class MyController extends Controller { function f() { if (!$ ( Read more... )