Elizabeth's Blog

At our giftsforengineers.com site, we use ZenCart for the front end, but 100% of our backend was written by me. In the course of working through some personnel changes here, it's forced me to take on additional responsibilities which have also caused me to take a closer look at my own code. The majority of my code was written some 6 years ago, with some additional modules added on as needed as the years went by. It's clear to me that our whole system could use some major reworking, if not a complete rewrite. ...

I mentioned that Michael Kimsal recorded an impromptu podcast from Codemash, and lo and behold he's already posted it to WebDevRadio. Since he's already posted it, that probably means he didn't do too much editing, which should make for an interesting podcast ;)....

Codemash 2008 has commenced and I'm proud to be a part of it! The day began with a keynote from Neal Ford who spoke about polyglot programming, and how the future holds much potential for dynamic languages on managed runtimes with testing as the driving factor. He used the concept of software engineering being similar to civil engineering and how the art of developing an app is like designing a bridge. He told an interesting story about the gentlemen who realized reinforced concrete was the wave of the future for bridge building, but the math didn't support his theories and ...

I am in love with the Smashing Magazine site, as it's a fabulous reference site for web devs (although admittedly, they have a focus on design topics as opposed to coding). Their tagline is "we smash you with information that will make your life easier. Really." and they do live up to that. I've been keeping an eye on them for a long time, and if you don't have them in your feed reader, or on your list of favorites then you really should....