Adapting The Joel Test To Web Development

Nearly a decade ago, Joel Spolsky came up with a method by which to evaluate software development shops that has come to be known as the Joel Test. This crucial test evaluates a software development company on the basis of twelve criteria points; Spoksly said that “a score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.”
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Q&A: Answering Some Questions About Object-Oriented Programming

Last week I wrote about five tips to improve object-oriented code. This generated a number of important questions, which I will attempt to answer for those who asked them.

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Five Tips To Make Good Object-Oriented Code Better

Last week, I did a talk at the Frederick Web meetup about tips and tricks for improving your object-oriented code. A lot of these tips were adapted from a fabulous presentation by Stefan Priebsch but the ideas are by no means original to him, and they’re exceptionally good ideas when you’re talking about object-oriented code. Slides are at the end of this blog post, and I’m happy to do this talk over again for local groups.

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Micro Optimizations That Don’t Matter

Last week I wrote about some optimizations you can apply to your code that will improve the performance of your site significantly. I also mentioned that regularly an article pops up talking about ways to shave time off your scripts, and I talked about how these articles mostly are bunk. Like this one.
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Five Cool PHP Array Functions

Time and time again, I come across code that contains a variety of array-handling functions that too often duplicate the work that the PHP core team has done to develop built-in array functions. Since the built-in functions are inherently faster, trying to reimplement them in PHP will inevitably be a performance problem.

Here are five of my favorite array functions, along with their signatures and what they do.
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Does A Mess Constitute Technical Debt?

A blog post over at Object Mentor argues that technical debt and a mess are not necessarily the same thing. This well written blog post discusses the difference, and asserts that taking out technical debt is like taking out a mortgage: that you increase your discipline, rather than decreasing your financial discipline. The same should be true of technical debt, then.
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