Learning…

Posted by mkhairul - August 28, 2009 at 02:08:30 am - 2 Comments

Categories: blog

Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain

A rather detailed explanation on how we learn. Scientific breakthrough in neuroscience reveals ancient wisdoms that has been passed down to generation after generation.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

“Seek to understand then to be understood”

GET vs POST

Posted by mkhairul - August 24, 2009 at 06:08:42 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

A good definitive guide on GET vs POST at carsonified.

Here’s a quick summary:
Rule #1: Use GET for safe actions and POST for unsafe actions.
Rule #2: Use POST when dealing with sensitive data.
Rule #3: Use POST when dealing with long requests.
Rule #4: Use GET in AJAX environments.

I liked how he did the workflow. Nice and simple

Running IE6 and IE7 simultaneously for testing

Posted by mkhairul - August 17, 2009 at 06:08:56 am - No Comments

Categories: Tips, blog

Apparently, the a government organisation that I’m working with is still using IE6. As much as I hate IE6, I’d have to bear with it.

I don’t use IE as much (why bother?), since Chrome and Firefox are far better which results in me still using IE6. I still need to test the stuff on IE7 and see how it looks. For that I downloaded and installed IE7 standalone which is a blessing since I don’t want to install IE7 and replace a bunch of stuffs and have to restart my PC.

In other news, IE6 supported by Microsoft till 2014.

Those arrogant fucks, how dare they provide long-term support for their software!

Comment policy

Posted by mkhairul - August 17, 2009 at 03:08:07 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

Well, this is not my comment policy, but it sure is funny and the best one that I’ve seen.

“This ain’t the goddamn Barney show, I’m not a goddamn purple dinosaur, and I don’t give a flying fuck about your *feelings.* I don’t love you, I don’t want to be your friend, and as far as I’m concerned, caring means not setting your house on fire.”

Multiple icons (or buttons) in one image

Posted by mkhairul - August 15, 2009 at 01:08:47 am - No Comments

Categories: Development, Tips

That’s what I searched using google. Didn’t get much, had to browse a few links to see whether it rings a bell. The term that I’m looking for is CSS Sprites.

I’m not gonna reiterate whatever that’s available in the web right now, I’m just too tired. So here’s a list of links for you all to read about it.

• CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
• CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

Its not a new thing, its been around for quite some time but there aren’t many people that I’ve met have actually the need to do it (where performance is crucial for the web site/application). I’m preparing an app for facebook, so these sort of things have to be kept in mind when there’s a possibility (not big, but just in case..) of millions (most probably a few thousand) joins in and beat the crap out of the server.

Here’s an example of a company you’re already familiar with thats using this technique.

Think a little, code a little..

Posted by mkhairul - August 12, 2009 at 01:08:53 am - No Comments

Categories: Development, design, management, rants

Referring to the comment on the post by Mark Needham, Think a little, code a little.

Lazy coding often also takes the form of a “coding frenzy” where the euphoria of programming combined with the anticipation of the client’s happiness when a project is delivered early can cause a situation where the programmer hurries in order to create the single deliverable at the expense of the clean code base. Unfortunately, this often has the opposite of the desired effect later on in the application lifecycle when the technical debt starts to catch up with you, and suddenly your maintenance time is increased and time between releases is decreased. There’s most certainly a balance. One extreme assumes the future, while the other ignores it. We certainly have a limited view of what’s ahead. Assume neither nothing nor everything, but assume something in between. This is what “think a little, code a little” sounds like to me.

I had experienced this in my previous job, where an obvious coding frenzy (or orgy; any act of immoderate indulgence; “an orgy of shopping”; “an emotional binge”; “a splurge of spending” ) have taken place. There is actually very little developer documentation (I was asked to refer to the User Requirement Specification aka URS) for more information, which is totally useless.

I used to prefer going into that ‘frenzy’ mode, coding endlessly for a couple of days to shove it off into the net but when something else came up, I had to postpone the project, to come back to it later (4-5 months), and realized I’m just making a mess.

For a project with a huge amount of CRUD, its better thinking about grace degradation. Don’t just put in javascript to look cool (like facebook, etc) and magically does all the ajax stuffs. I know aesthetics is important for most users, but don’t go down that road too early, it’ll end up being a huge pain.

Manage Energy instead of Time

Posted by mkhairul - August 9, 2009 at 02:08:01 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

I am one of the people guilty of trying to manage their time, when it is not time that should be managed, but energy.

After reading Zen Habit’s, How to Live without the Clock, I felt a transcending surge going through me realizing a fact that I should have already known.

“Our obsession with time is one of the largest sources of misery in today’s world.”

I still list all the stuffs that I should do in a day, or in a week. Just to see what can be done.

New job on the horizon

Posted by mkhairul - August 6, 2009 at 04:08:27 am - No Comments

Categories: rants

There’s a job waiting for me. Its only a matter of meeting with someone. Most meetings like this results in one question, why should I pay you? In my case, its probably, what would I be doing if I work here?

Cutting to the chase, I’d have to say I won’t be doing as much coding as other employees on the company’s flagship software. What I would be doing is a lot of managing the development team. Continuous integration, ORMs, issue tracking, testing, release numbering, etc. Mostly pair programming with the team, so they could be up to my level (most of the developers are fresh graduates).

Other than that, I could contribute to scaling the application for large companies. Caching, clustering, etc, and maybe a few testing to estimate the capacity of the application with x resources (I explained the limitations of moodle when presenting to a big GLC few weeks ago).

I think that should be enough points to get me on board. I’d have to follow-up on a few projects to see if its going to start this month.

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