My take on open source licenses
Open Source licensing can be a confusing and daunting task. Most developers simply adopt licenses of other popular projects. I wanted to shed some light on the most popular licenses and provide some guidance on which one should be used and when.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, I am not qualified to nor am I imparting sound legal advice.
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Ultimate Vim Config
I have spent the last few years tweaking and refining my VIM configuration. This is the ultimate VIM configuration .vimrc file. It is well organized and documented. It is on GitHub so you can always grab the latest. It works well alone, but is intended to be paired with the plugins and configuration found in my complete .vim configuration also hosted on GitHub.
The Golden Hammer
- Image by Kyle May via Flickr
Every so often a “new” technology catches on. RIght now it’s nosql databases. A couple years ago it was Ruby, before that it was java. Each arise because they propose a solution to an existing problem, or in other words a better way of doing something.. something, but not everything. Read more
NoSQL Databases
- Image by langalex via Flickr
Amazon, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all started on sql databases (all but Amazon on MySQL) and have transitioned to incorporated nosql databases into their infrastructure, though many utilize both relational databases as well as non-relational ones.
I’ve compiled a few resources to help bring you up to speed on nosql databases. Read more
Next Gen PHP Frameworks
Image via Wikipedia
With the release of PHP 5.3, PHP released the most significant capabilities in years. Specifically the addition of Late Static Bindings, Lambda Functions and Closures, and Namespaces has changed everything. These new features open new doors for solutions previously impossible. As a result in recent months there has been a flood of new frameworks and libraries taking advantage of these new features. Effectively we are approaching the third wave of PHP frameworks. Read more
VIM Crash Course
- Image via Wikipedia
Most developers know the basics of VIM, enough to edit a conf file, but most stay there, unaware of the power and beauty of vim. One of my developers has expressed desire to abandon the bloated GUI ways of eclipse and discover VIM. I have been using VIM for such a long time I forgot how difficult that transition is. Here are some resources and approaches to help you learn vim. Read more
Human readable du sorted by size
- Image via Wikipedia
du is the *nix command for disk usage. It tells you how much space everything in the given directory is taking up. GNU du introduced a handy option -h making it human readable, or showing sizes using K, M, G rather than bytes. Unfortunately this makes it not sortable numerically. Here’s how to sort du by size and keep it as human readable. Read more
Using the right keys
Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr
Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password.
In our office we have a similarly shared bathroom, but instead of a password, we have a physical key required to unlock the door.
A password for the bathroom was just the right amount of security. It prevented just any stranger from easily accessing the bathroom, but wasn’t inconvenient and easy to provide access to. My friend simply told me the password and I as a visitor had all I needed to enter. It was the right amount of security for the right purpose. Read more