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  Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a ...

   Web design,Paradigm,Advice,User experience,Flow     2012-01-05 08:16:18

  The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

A friendly reminder: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven Pressfield Some stuff is just hard. We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself. The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a s...

   Business,Problem,Strategy     2011-12-07 08:37:29

  Removing duplicates in sql

In modern web development, it’s standard practice to make use of a database abstraction layer, typically an Object-Relational Mapper based on either the Active Record pattern or the Data Mapper pattern. There are several pros and cons to this which are fairly well established, so I’ll spare us all from enumerating them all right now. One established pro worth mentioning is that these systems typically provide a high level interface for fetching data, often removing the need to ...

   SQL,Duplicate,Remove,Web design     2012-01-05 08:20:13

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Can you learn to invest successfully using your smartphone?

Got some spare cash saved away, and want to start looking into building a financial portfolio and perhaps investing for your future? Putting your smartphone to good use every now and again, and spending your time on it productively rather than just for mindless social media scrolling and games, can actually help you to reach a better financial position before you’ve even noticed. For those interested, here are a few different tips on how you can learn to invest successfully using your smar...

   PROMOTION,SMARTPHONE,INVESTMENT     2020-07-01 00:37:42

  Replacing small C programs with Haskell

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in ca...

   C,Haskell,Small program     2012-01-03 10:51:39

  PHP to get long running process progress dynamically

Frequently in web applications, we may have a request to the back end system which may trigger a long running process such as searching huge amount of data or a long running database process. Then the front end webpage may hang and wait for the process to be finished. During this process, if we can provide the user some information about the progress of the back end process, it may improve user experience. Unfortunately, in web applications, this seems not an easy task because web scripting lang...

   AJAX,PHP,progress,long process,demo     2012-06-04 07:29:37

  How to send asynchronous requests in PHP

It’s easy to make asynchronous calls in PHP with just a little bit of HTTP header knowledge and some library code around PHP sockets. This technique is useful when posting requests to your own server for bits of logic you’d like to run in the background.  If you don’t control the endpoint, you might not be comfortable with some of the limitations, such as the inability to read anything from the response.  So, you couldn’t post data to a we...

   PHP,Asynchronous request,socket     2012-04-28 06:45:51

  API Design is UI for Developers

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently.I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.22/02/2012 19:10 via webReplyRetweetFavorite@gparkerGreg ParkerWhen I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could design a better programming language. One which behaved in a sane fashion without a lot of le...

   API design,UI,developers,PHP     2012-03-11 13:21:43

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