Unconventional

A friend of mine who I occasionally help with development tasks came to me the other day asking about starting a project which would involve leveraging an API. Given that I develop APIs and domain architecture, this seemed like a pretty good fit for my talents.  I can produce the business logic and a simple chrome extension that talks to it and then we can explore further opportunities later, knowing that everything has been nicely abstracted. I've coded against a few public APIs in my time for various things ranging from social media to push messaging.  Although each time, I'm always left feeling like what I did was never a first-class citizen in my project.  In many cases with APIs, you're only leveraging the external model, but in the case of my new project, I actually plan on "extending" it... Read on if you're interested in any of the techniques involved, including repositories and project structure. Extension Defined When working with an extern

I had the great fortune of being sent to OSCON by my employer (we're hiring!) this year.  On top of getting to hear from lots of like-minded developers and learning about technology I might not have otherwise considered, I also managed to score some loot!  The most notable of which being a Surface Pro 3 which I had been coveting since their release, but had lost interest due to very steep prices. Getting it was actually an interesting process that I was perfectly okay with playing into because we're all at OSCON to have fun and learn. Being their main source of revenue, it's important that Microsoft fend off the impression that Windows is developer unfriendly.  So, the overall gist of Microsoft's booth at OSCON this year was to remind people that you can in fact develop using free and open source tools on Windows, a non-unix.  ( Curiously, I have been saying since the 90s that FOSS would be the norm and Microsoft's 180 on it of late is just more writing on the wa

I've been working on some Laravel 4 based packages lately which inevitably results in me also looking at other packages. I've noticed sometimes that people use facades at times that give me pause. The most troubling being from inside their model classes. A quick google turned up this video which assures people "there's still an instance behind everything, we're fine" .  Everything mentioned in the video is true except that there is a very glaring omission. Scope What usually goes out the door at the start of a long series of mishaps in software design is scope . When the desire to obtain a solution is stronger than the desire to consider the implications of a firm approach, mistakes are sure to follow.  Sacrifices like this are made due to the assumption of a high cost to developing carefully. What really is happening however is a false dilemma , being responded to with a convenience decision . It's very easy to write model code like

Just a small blog post for developers trying to make heads or tails of how to work with OpenGraph, self-initiated likes and preparing web sites for facebook integration: These two pages seemed to give me the clearest bird's eye view of things: Like Like Button Migration I'd file this under "You didn't ask the right question!" , sometimes documentation fails to establish the basics and this is one example of that.