To keep learning and progressing in my line of work, you have to be learning new things everyday. The evolution is so fast that if you don’t go forward, you are effectively going backwards.
I need ideas of useful apps or libraries to include in this challenge.
So, my challenge for 2010 will be to build one web app every month, and publish it here on the last day of each month. My schedule is pretty tight right now, so the apps will have to be rather quick to develop, but hopefuly it will help me learn new techniques and better coding practices. As they say, “practice makes perfect”…
Whether I use a framework or not is entirely up to me, but I’d like to take this opportunity to try my hand at Kohana. I’ve been using CodeIgniter for nearly one year, and it seems like Kohana takes the CI spirit one step further.
So, this is where I need your help : I need ideas of useful apps or libraries to include in this challenge. The first one is going to be a url shortener, developping the shortening and storing algorithms from scratch. I’m not sure whether I should do it as a standalone app, a standalone library, or a Kohana library…
So, if you have any ideas about what I should develop, something you need, whatever, please comment below, thanks!
EDIT: The result of the January Challenge is now live : The URL shortener
I just created a very simple plugin for BlueIce, the anti-CMS. It simply inserts a list containg links to all pages in the web site. The author published it on his 3rd party plugins page, and I highly recommend his anti-CMS for small, semi static sites.
It includes a clever cache system, so your web site will be almost as fast as if it was pure static html. All pages are rendered using Markdown, making for simple content editing, using a text editor and an FTP client.
How do you go from a 6 seconds query to a 0.0001 second one? Well it seems hinting, which is an Oracle thing and is not so well documented for MySQL, works anyway. Just adding this hint /*+FIRST_ROWS(10)*/ to a select statement dramatically reduces query time. From the person who gave me that tricks, this tells MySQL to start sending the result as soon as it gets x rows back, and not to wait for the query to complete.
A 6 seconds query returns results in less than a milisecond with SELECT /*+FIRST_ROWS(10)*/
For big result sets, this is a significant advantage.
It does not work with GROUP BY statements, and I’m not sure if it does with ORDER BY. It would be logical that it doesn’t, as MySQL needs the whole result set before it can start sorting, thus bringing the hinting help to zero.
In my latest project at work I need to import data from an acess database into mySQL to be able to create an online shop from that data. Instead of importing just the database of that particular client, I created a generic PHP class that can import any Access database to MySQL.
Big databases must be imported by chunks.
Since Access databases can get so big, the import class has to do its job by chunks, to avoid memory limits. It also needs to reload itself when it detects it is close to the time limit, all of which it now does without any problems.
We can now import (hopefully) any Access database.
Hey, I’m starting work as a web developer at tecknosfera this monday 13th of july. Pretty quick, as I sent my CV through domestika on the 2nd of july and was interviewed on the 7th. They look like nice folks, and they have done some good stuff in the past, so I think it will be an interesting and challenging job. They are located in the city of Madrid, about 30 minutes from where I live by public transport and 15 minutes walking, which is not too bad…
The post is half time, so I’m still available for freelance web design work.
I am just trynig codeIgniter, and it looks really powerful. After ona afternoon of work, I manage to get a working, albeit extremely basic, blog engine, able to create posts, delete and edit them, display them all together or one by one with clean SEO-friendly urls. No too bad, right? Ah, apart from that, i’ve been hired by tecknosfera 
