Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: programming

Design Patterns

“In this interview, Erich Gamma, co-author of the landmark book, Design Patterns, talks with Bill Venners about how design patterns are problem solution pairs, how design patterns help you understand intent and tradeoffs, and how to become a better designer through practice.” Some pieces that caught my eye: Bill Venners: In the GoF book you […]

Open Source Web Design

Aaaaand, yet another interesting project: Open Source Web Design. For those unfortunate souls that have to make it through life without any artistic skills whatsoever. Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier […]

The most important development documentation…

The most important development documentation might not be functional specifications, technical specs, use cases, design diagrams or UML graphs. Since the most work done on finished applications is bugfixing and very small feature enchancements, it’s usually not much of a problem doing without these. But taking over a project without any knowledge on the build […]

Java is weird

You know.. a language that has two different, non-interchangable, types for integers is a language I’ll never trust to do anything right. Especially when I try to compare two numeric values (an int and Integer) with eachother and it starts spouting errors like this: *** Semantic Error: The type of this expression, “java.lang.Integer”, is not […]

Talkers and Doers

A while ago, I wrote a little piece on two types of programmers. The practical programmer and the acadamic programmer. This article describes it better, eventhough it’s much more focused on the shipping end-product. Some excerpts: One day I went to a brown bag lunch, and a lead architect proudly proclaimed that he had used […]

Python documentation

I’ve been doing some Python programming for the last couple of days. Now, Python is a pretty cool language, but its main problem is, in my oppinion at least, the absolutely terrible documentation. I can’t find anything in there. Thankfully, there’s always the Python Quick Reference (v2.4, v2.3) and the alternative Python Reference (It’s a […]

Learn XUL

XUL is an XML dialect that describes user interfaces and it is what Mozilla and Firefox are built upon. You can use XUL to build an interface and then use Javascript to control the application. There’s a very interesting introduction to XUL over at DevShed An Introduction to XUL, Part 1 An Introduction to XUL, […]

Playground: Table column drag’n’drop resize

I write web applications at my work and in them I frequently make use of tables displaying information. Unfortunatelly, everybody always keeps asking ‘Can you increase the size of this or that limited table column?’. Normally, we use tooltips to display contents that has been cut off, but that often requires some users to mouse-over […]

Joel On Software linkdump

I regularly read Joel On Software because Joel is somebody who, for a change, has a brain of his own and who isn’t afraid to bitch on certain programming conventions even if the rest of the world thinks they’re the Ultimate Solution. I usually tend to agree with Joel. This time he explains how coding […]

PHP Cheat Sheet

Downloaded it today, and it’s already indispensable: PHP Cheat Sheet

The text of all posts on this blog, unless specificly mentioned otherwise, are licensed under this license.