Web Development on Justin Carmony

Webpack, React, and Multiple Versions Issues

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 18:10:21 +0000

I’ve been using React successfully for several projects, and tonight I ran into a problem I hadn’t experienced before. I was trying both react-d3and react-d3-components when I would get an error on rendering:

Uncaught TypeError: Can't add property context, object is not extensible

This error had a very, very deep stack trace far into the depths of React, and I was worried I had encountered a nasty React bug. After some poking around & googling, I discovered that multiple versions of React do not play nicely with each other, at all. When I had installed both those react component libraries, each installed their own version of React, version 0.12. I was using React version 0.13.

Vagrant & PHP: Our Success Story At The Deseret News

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:36:11 +0000

The simple world of LAMP is fading fast into the distance. When I first started developing websites, you’d just drop your PHP code in a document root, configure it to connect to a mysql database, and that was it.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup, include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on.

Refactoring or Rebuilding: Working with Legacy Code

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:08:43 +0000

Everyone has some form of Legacy code, and at my new job we have plenty of it. The Deseret News has been around in paper format since 1850, and has had a web presence since 1996. I can still find parts of our codebase for running with Sybase and Vignette. Fortunately, most of the code we work with is much more modern using the latest PHP with an in-house MVC framework. However, there is still one big piece written in a less than ideal system. Its still PHP, but much more hacked together. It is our backend CMS system for controlling the website. It is painful to use, and we get many complaints all the time about it. When I joined the company three months ago, I was told we were going to completely rewrite it. Three months later, the “rewrite” of the CMS is still ages away and we’re continuing to hack to support requested changes.

Talk: Demystifying CSS for Developers - PHP Tek 2012

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:24 +0000

Slides

https://www.slideshare.net/JustinCarmony/demystifying-css-wordpress

Working with Middle-Scale Websites

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:02:40 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this idea for awhile, and I thought I would put a name to the thought. I brought up this idea while I was giving my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference in 2009. Here is the problem I think most individuals in the web development face:

Hopefully at some point, your website gets a lot of traffic. Yay, you’ve reached your goal of getting good traffic, but it is soon followed by issues with performance and load. I like to call these the growing pains of a website. So as a web developer, I suddenly have the epiphany of “Hey, I need to scale my website!” What follows next is the biggest mistake a web developer can make:

How I Became a Web Developer & CTO

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:57:56 +0000

Note: many of the screenshots of websites I had done in the past are from the Internet Archive and many of the images are missing. But it can give an idea on the projects I had worked on. One day I’ll try and track down the original files and update the screenshots.

Today some memories came from when I first started with web development. So before I forget anymore of the details, I thought I would share my unique way I became a web developer. I never went to school to learn Computer Science or Information Systems. I’ve had a total of 2 programming classes, which were my in sophomore and junior years of High School, one of which we lovingly nicknamed Warcraft 101, because we would spend the entire time getting out butts kicked in Warcraft 2 by my classmate Daren (We all got A’s, we had just finished the entire coursework in 2 and a half weeks).

MySQL Sleeping Connections & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:51:48 +0000

If you want to skip to the explanation, just read below. But before then, here is a little background.

A Little Background

On January 2nd, we started to run into some serious performance problems with Dating DNA, so we began the process of going and deciding what were our problems, and how to optimize them. At the beginning, the Database was the bottleneck. It would get flooded with requests, and unable to handle them all, each query would slow down. We were using a tool called Jet Profiler (which I will post about more in detail later), but here is a graph it would output before we started out optimizations:

Creating Chatroom / Walls with Redis & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:15:16 +0000

Preface: This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but more of an outline on what I did. Also, I wrote this really quickly before heading off to dinner, so if there are parts that are unclear, or you have questions about, please leave a comment!

This last week has been a roller coaster for us at Dating DNA. We had an excellent holiday season, but with mass volume of new sign ups our servers started to slow down. Severely. Something you never want to have happen. So over this last week I’ve worked about 80 hours (though I’m a salary employee, woohoo… :P) and implemented a lot of new performance boots, and I have about four or five blog posts worth of discoveries I need to write. So before I forget them, I’m going to write them.

SVN Switch - Key to Success In Web Development

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:13:05 +0000

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

PHP HipHop – What It Means

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:32:04 +0000

There has been a lot of speculation about PHP, Facebook, and a big announcement. Over the last few weeks, several predominate PHP community members were invited to the Facebook offices to check something out. Facebook asked the PHP members, as Ben Ramsey put it, to “make a gentleman’s agreement that I wouldn’t talk until FB is ready.”

Well, Facebook has made their announcement, and it is called HipHop. Here is an excerpt:

Google Apps Dropping IE 6

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:16:59 +0000

This morning I found this email in my inbox. I use Google Apps to host my email and calendars, which works really slick and is fabulous. Here is the email:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

Joining a Startup - The Advantages

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:50:36 +0000

While going through my backlog of my RSS feeds. I stumbled on Keith Casey’s post on Joining a Startup. He wrote it as a “reality check” for people who are considering joining a startup as a developer. Here is a snip-it:

First, everyone does everything. Check your ego at the door. In the first startup I was with, I was in charge of adding reporting to the eCommerce application and taking the garbage out. Was it an effective use of my time? Not at all. Did it have to be done? Yes. Did we have the money to hire someone else? Nope. If your startup is renting office space, you probably won’t have to worry about this… but who signs for packages? Who re-orders coffee? On the flip side, you could be the one taking technical questions at the next investor pitch or invited to the big customer Christmas party.

Presentation: Real Life Scaling

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:39:44 +0000

Here are my slides for the presentation that I gave at the Utah Open Source Conference on Friday. It was an awesome conference, and I am glad that I was able to be involved.

Real Life Scaling: A Tale of Two Websites http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=reallifescaling-ataleoftwowebsites-small-091010143045-phpapp02&stripped_title=real-life-scaling-a-tale-of-two-websites

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.

Article: Why Developers Get Fired

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:43:04 +0000

Here is an article that showed up on my RSS feed: Why Developers Get Fired. While I never have been fired from a job, I have been put in a situtaion where I needed to prove my worth to the company. The advice this article gives is pretty good, and in my opinion are the most overlooked issues. A developer could easily overlook these issues, and get side blinded by a pink slip. Here is an exceprt:

Article: 5 Things Your Clients Should Know

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:45:13 +0000

I read an interesting article on teaching your clients about web design. It brings up some great points on helping your client understanding their role in their website’s development. While its not in inclusive list, it brings up some good points. I’ll share a few quotes:

This is not a criticism of clients, however. There is so little information that clearly defines their role. Sure, there is no shortage of material on usability, accessibility, online marketing and copywriting, but who has the time to read all of it?

"Nerfing" a PHP Object

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:26:35 +0000

I was trying to think of something with PHP I could blog about that would be short and sweet. Then I thought of something that a good friend of my taught me: nerfing objects.

The Problem

Many times while working with PHP and bigger frameworks, you’ll have classes that extend classes that extand classes. We have an ORM system that interfaces our Database with PHP classes. This makes accessing and updating information easy for us. So lets say we have a class called “Post” that stores a blog post. Our ORM class just takes a few lines of code to hook up our “Post” class to the “posts” database tables. We just extend our base DataObject, which contains all sorts of references to other class isntances. Long story short, this PHP code is awesome, but there is one issue.

Being a Productive Developer

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:50:59 +0000

Doh! I meant to schedule this for Thursday, so oops! Already off my schedule, but oh well. :P

These last few weeks my productivity seems to have been fluctuating, and it has been irritating. So I’ve decided over the next few weeks to keep track of how I work, see what works well and what doesn’t, and figure out how I can be more productive.

Just as I would suggest any company with scaling/growth problems, I’m going to do the same with me: metrics. You can’t really know where and what to fix if you can’t tell how they are performing. So I’m going to start to keep track of my time in a lot more detail. I think this will help me in so many fronts, and I’ve known for a long time I need to do this. I’ve signed up for a demo account with Harvest, a time tracking software. Why? They seem to have a great interface, both Windows and Mac apps, and iPhone web and native app. So it will be easy to keep track of what I’m doing no matter what or where I am.

So You Want To Be A Web Developer?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:54:35 +0000

This last week I’ve been talking with my brother Brack, who to say the least, absolutely abhors his job. Well, maybe abhor is a little strong, but he is extremely frustrated and unsatisfied. He works at a air force base in the human resource department and he basically helps provide statistical data for departments on who, what, and where to hire new help. Since he is a “wiz” at solving problems, computers, and making this more efficient, he has streamlined his work process with several nifty Excel spreadsheets and Java programs. He can now take a weeks worth of work and do it in one morning.

Project Management & Entrepreneurship

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:51:51 +0000

My dear friend Eric Ping pointed out I only had a few days left before I’d break my year and half record of posting at least every month. I was wondering what to write about, and last night I figured out what to write.

Yesterday after going to dinner with Joanna, my wife, we went to our guilty pleasure store: Barnes & Noble. Since I already have the entire Wheel of Time series to re-read for the upcoming books, I walked over to the technical section of books. I looked over the majority of titles, most of them for beginners learning a new type of language. It got me thinking. Over the last five years I have spent most of my time and energy working on becoming a great web developer. I’ve been working hard on my design skills, searching the web for examples and resources. I’ve been trying to make my PHP code more maintainable, efficient and clean. These last years I’ve been asking myself over and over “how can I do this better?” “How can I be a better developer?”

Writing Effictive PHP Caches with Memcached

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:52:15 +0000

**** Update: I gave a presentation at the Utah PHP Usergroup about memcached that went really well. Here are the slides I used:*

Effectice Caching w/ PHP + Caching http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=memcachedandphppresentation-090821151850-phpapp02&stripped_title=effectice-caching-w-php-caching

View more presentations from Justin Carmony.

Delayed, yet again, at the airport. Time to get this article written once and for all.

This is a rough draft, I still need to go through and proof read this article. However, several friends were anxious to read it, so here it is rough for now. :P

Data Backups - There Are No Excuses

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:04:48 +0000

Today I just had the terrible experience of having a database lose data, need to restore, only to not have a recent backup. If you haven’t had this experience before, please, take this serious. My wife was home for lunch as it happened, and she watched as the blood drained from my face. It only took a few seconds for the loss to happen, and immediately I knew exactly what the repercussions where. The immediate second thought that passes through your brain is “Where are my backups?” That is when I realized I didn’t have my nightly backups set up on this server. I quickly checked the file date on the last known backup I had.

Recursively Add New Files to SVN

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:33 +0000

One great thing about running Windows is TortoiseSVN. I makes managing my SVN so easy. One of the problems I’ve ran into on other systems was I had been working for several hours. I would have dozens of new files and with TortoiseSVN it would show me a list of all the new files and I could hit “select all” and commit. However, on Mac I haven’t found an SVN client that I like, so I just use the terminal commands. There are also times, like when managing a WordPress installation, that WordPress and its plug-ins could auto update. I wanted to be able to add all the new files on the linux server back into the svn.

Aptana Studio – PHP IDE Alternative to PDT, Zend Studio

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:09:53 +0000

The other day I ran into another option as an IDE for PHP. If you’ve been following my blog, I’ve been a big user of Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) and Zend Studio (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/). There is a third one to add to the list, Aptana Studio. It is built on-top of the Eclipse framework, like PDT and Zend Studio. It has several extensions: Python, Rails, PHP, and others. If you’ve read my post on Consumer Linux, I talk a lot about “Power & Polish.” Here is my definition:

Software Development With Clients In Mind

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:05:56 +0000

Why does it seem so hard to deliver quality products to clients? Sometimes it feels like clientseither don’t appreciate quality, or they have their priorities all mixed up. To help us understand, here is a wonderful sketch from Monty Python called “The Architect’s Sketch.”

I’ve been searching for awhile for a good example for this subject, and when I saw this sketch, I knew this would be perfect. It outlines two large problems with developing solutions for clients: quality & suitability.

Great PHP Article: Leadership in Software Development

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:24:48 +0000

I just read a good article on PHP Development by Cal Evans, an active member in the PHP community. Its about managers, developers, and the problems they face in the IT industry. Here is an excerpt:

There are very few professions that combine the creativity involved in good software development and the rigorous deadlines, often imposed from the outside. Hurry up and create! The ideas have to keep flowing, they have to be scheduled, and they have to be completed on time. If you have to go figure something out, go. But make sure you are back after lunch and make sure your schedule doesn’t slip. Developers, especially now as we work in Web years, are under increasing pressure to “Get it out the door fast!”.

List of 50 PHP Tools

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:08:58 +0000

Found a great article listing popular tools that every PHP developer should be away of. Here is an excerpt:

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That’s why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective.

Characteristics of Good PHP Code

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:20:02 +0000

At the time I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a very delayed layover flight to San Diego. Wonderful weather causing all sorts of headaches. So I’ve decided to make the best of my time by writing the introductory article to a series of PHP articles. I’ve had this idea for a while, and now I’m going to finally sit down and write it.

A Different Type of Article

CSS – I’m 100% Converted

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:01:35 +0000

It has been a hard, long road. But these last few days, I’ve finally have reached a realization of a great step in my life as a web design: I’m 100% converted to CSS layouts, and have forsaken tables. 5 years ago I would have believed that would be impossible, and that I would love and use tables for my layouts until the day I die. I remember hearing the lectures and heated discussions on using CSS instead, but I couldn’t bring myself to using CSS for layouts. Don’t get me wrong, using CSS was amazing for formatting and styling, such a color, size, bolding, etc. I love it every second and my conversion to CSS for those scenarios was very quick. However, the positioning of content, headers, footers, side menus and navigation was a nightmare for me at first. I just didn’t get it.

New Dating DNA Front Page

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:04:16 +0000

Since we’re still pending in the Apple iPhone App Store for review, we wanted a new fresh image for the Dating DNA website front page. Kevin, the CEO, threw together a simplified new front page. He is pretty good with Photoshop, and knows how to slice up a layout for image and put it into HTML. I know he did it using tables (I know, every serious web developer alive is chringing right now), which works for now. I like the general idea and execution. I think we can polish and refine it a great deal more, but I thought I would get people’s opinions.

HTML Education in Universities

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:24:46 +0000

Why, oh why, are website classes so extremely out of date in universities, colleges, and schools? I just spent the last few hours helping my wife with her Information Systems class. I’ve had to do similar assignments for technology classes, yet the things they are teaching are extremely out of date and a waste of time. Why? After taking these classes, to actually use HTML, I would have to unlearn 80% of what they taught, and re-learn from scratch.

PHP Singletons, Sub-Classing, and HAS-A Relationships

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:37:53 +0000

I’ve been very busy these last fews weeks and have neglected making any posts. While there are a variety of subjects I’d love to post about, they’ll most likely have to wait until the next year. However, I thought I might be able to throw up a quick example of how to use PHP Singletons and extending public classes.

The Singleton Pattern “is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object.” (Wikipedia) In PHP, a singleton is created by making the constructor protected or private. “How do you create an object then?” Its done in two parts. First, you make a static class variable that is private, to hold the instance. Second, create a static function to return the instance. Here is an example:

Speaking: Utah PHP Usergroup – Streamlined Web Development

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:41:51 +0000

Next Thursday, November 20th, at 7 PM Mountain Time (9PM EST, 6PM PST) I will be speaking at the Utah PHP Usergroup meeting on “Streamlined Web Development.” I will be speaking with Kevin Carter from Code Greene. Here is the annoucement on the UPHPU website:

I’m very pleased to announce the topic for November’s UPHPU Meeting : Streamlined Web Development using a VCS (Version Control System) and Trac.

Starting the meeting off will be Code Greene’s Kevin Carter. Kevin, who has used Git in a production environment for several months now, will be presenting a primer on how to get started with Git. Additionally, he’ll cover the advantages of distributed source code control and possibly some topics on using git in an svn eniroment. His blog can be found at http://dexterthedragon.com.

PHP Design - Biggest Database Oversights

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:56:44 +0000

Over the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to work on several PHP projects, some of them having grown rapidly and required to scale quickly. Three in particular have been a fantastic learning experience for me. Now I don’t consider myself a total expert, but I thought I would share my experiences. Many PHP developers are self-taught, like I was, and are learning PHP to be able to create dynamic websites. Many haven’t had studied or learned best practices for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). They are web designers first, and programming in PHP is just a way to do things simple HTML can’t do.

Empowering JavaScript Through jQuery

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:31:27 +0000

Once I discovered jQuery, my life as a web developer changed. There are few libraries, tools, etc. that I can honestly say have completely changed the way I code. In all honesty, jQuery makes the difficult aspects of JavaScript and turns them into a strength. I recommend it over any other JavaScript library I know. It is smaller, leaner, straight forwards, and more powerful than anything out there. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Dell use it. Microsoft is now including jQuery in Visual Studio, their powerful IDE for making websites. If anything, I have yet to meet a person who has used jQuery and has gone to anything else.

Zend Studio vs PHP Development Tools

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:41:44 +0000

I’ve been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I’ve been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

Why Google Chrome is Good for FireFox

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:50:31 +0000

I’ve heard time after time people saying how FireFox might take a backseat to Google Chrome. However, I actually think Chrome and FireFox will benefit from each other. I think FireFox has nothing but to gain from Google Chrome. Let me give you an example why:

My brother Bryce works at Best Buy. They’ve been selling Apple Macs for the last few months and Bryce hates selling them to customers. The reason is people come in, say they want a Mac because they’ve heard so much about them, don’t listening to any suggestions or tips, and just buy it. That would be great, except usually within 1-2 weeks they come back wanting to return their Mac. Why Bryce asks why, one of the classic responses is “Well, I couldn’t find Internet Explorer.” These customers have been so accustomed to doing things their way that they don’t understand how to use anything else.

Web Development 10-Years Ago & Now

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:43:55 +0000

This week’s blogging challenge was our computer software now and then. Lorelle talked about the different versions of WordPress over time. I thought it was an interesting article.

10 Years Ago

I started web development back in 1997. My tools back then were:

Notepad - That right, the one and only. It was how most people did their websites back in the day. It hasn’t changed much over the years.
Adobe Photoshop v4 - The must have program for image editing:
Dreamweaver 1.0 - Thats right, I’ve been with dreamweaver since the beginning! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot)
ws_ftp95 - This old school FTP program was the bomb in my eyes since day 1. Boy have things come a long.

Technology wise I was serving up static HTML pages. When I had mastered Dreamweaver’s template system, I was able to run a website with 20+ pages not too bad. It was definitely interesting. Every time I made a change, it would go through and update every single page, and then I would upload every page to the server.

MySQL & PHP – SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS – An easy way to get the total number of rows regardless of LIMIT

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:30:48 +0000

Here is a little trick I found awhile back. I faced a challenge several months ago where I had to query a large, complex data result from MySQL. I “paged” through the results using LIMIT and OFFSET. However, I wanted to know the total number of rows w/o the LIMIT. The previous coder accomplished this by a query before appending the LIMIT statement at the end. This turned out to be very inefficient due to MySQL put together the 10000+ rows and sent it to PHP ready to be parsed, only to have the function mysql_num_rows() to be executed on it.

iPhone Web Development: Controlling the viewport via Javascript

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:58:07 +0000

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone web applications. A client wanted to create a portion of their site for the iPhone, and they wanted it to look a very specific way. In order to do this we had to set the view port’s maximum-scale and minimum-scale to 1. This gave them the functionality they desired.

However, one aspect of the web application allowed users to view photos. This caused a problem due to the fact that we had disabled the scale so they were not able to zoom in on photos via pinching.