Web Advent 2011

Introduction

Christmas is upon us once again, and it’s time to have a look at what’s under the Web Advent tree. Join us each day as our wonderful authors provide presents of tips, tricks, & tidbits to usher in the new year. Mele Kalikimaka!

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Seasons: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

24^th Dec: Facilitating Development Environment Consistency by Jeff Loiselle

Every developer is different, but your team’s development environment does not have…
23^rd Dec: Look Ma! No Passwords! by Dan Mills

Your user sign-in experience is one of the most important interactions on your site, and all of the options you have…
22^nd Dec: Keep the Front in the Front by Rachel Andrew

When rendering pages with our content management system, we have to try to stay out of our customers’…
21^st Dec: Social-Driven Development by Chris Cornutt

As any developer can tell you, the way we write apps has changed dramatically over the past year…
20^th Dec: Code for the Users, Not for the Spec by Drew McLellan

I don’t know exactly when it was that I started to resent the people I was writing code for, but it…
19^th Dec: Egomaniacal and Scalable Apps by David Coallier

The rise of cloud computing over the past few years has been incredible. Unfortunately, many still…
18^th Dec: Simplifying Commerce for Small Business by Ben Ramsey

The simple act of you giving me currency in exchange for a good or service I provide is not…
17^th Dec: PHP for All the Things by Matt Graham

PHP was originally designed for web sites and is still widely thought of only as a programming language for the Web…
16^th Dec: Cracks in the Foundation by Gwynne Raskind

PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. The language has creaky joints…
15^th Dec: Cross-Origin Ajax with CORS by David Walsh

Web developers are nothing if not persistent, so we’ve come up with ways to get around cross-origin…
14^th Dec: Nightmare Before (Last) Christmas by Jeremy Kendall

A little over a year ago I was plunged into a nightmare world. I had accepted a new job as the…
13^th Dec: Don’t Forget the Front by Beth Tucker Long

Everyone talks about automated testing for your code, but that’s only half of the testing I need. What…
12^th Dec: Bake Cookies Like a Chef by Michael Nitschinger

Let’s explore how to securely store data on the client side, and how to detect unwanted modifications…
11^th Dec: Out with the Old by Maggie Nelson

Jetpacks. Flying cars. Databases able to handle infinite amounts of data. Breakthrough after breakthrough, computer…
10^th Dec: Better Object-Oriented Arrays by Ryan Parman

I’ve been working on developer-facing software and SDKs in PHP for nearly a decade, and through…
9^th Dec: Merry Error Handling by Samer Atiani

PHP does not enjoy the same consistency in error (and exception) handling as other languages, mostly due to…
8^th Dec: Integration Testing by Wez Furlong

At some point in our respective programming careers, most of us have heard that Test-Driven Development is what…
7^th Dec: Twilio in Two Minutes by Elizabeth Naramore

I love Twilio. If you’re not yet familiar with Twilio and the amazing voice and text messaging stuff you can…
6^th Dec: Dates and Times by Evert Pot

Having dealt with a lot of dates and times — and the calculations between them — recently, I thought it might be a good idea to…
5^th Dec: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine by Paul Jones

It is easiest to describe the N+1 problem by example. Take a look at the following bit of PHP in a hypothetical…
4^th Dec: Better Than the Rest by Rob Allen

If you’ve written a web service that other clients are going to connect to, I’m willing to bet you think you’ve done…
3^rd Dec: Reduced-Friction Deployment by Chris Hartjes

I view my job as shepherding code from its inception in a Vim buffer, in a terminal session, in…
2^nd Dec: More Than Just Style by Laura Beth Denker

PHP CodeSniffer is a wonderfully simple tool for implementing and enforcing a coding standard.
1^st Dec: Because It’s Fun! by Derek Sivers

This is the only thing I love doing. Programming is pure creativity. Why would I hand off the fun stuff to someone else?