http://jasonleveille.com Beauty's where you find it Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:04:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Another great quote from Code Complete: Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development.  In my view, it's so important that Software's Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity ... Once you understand that all other technical goals in software are secondary to managing complexity, many design ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/importance-of-managing-complexity/ I completely embrace the idea of coding standards, and for a long time I've used my own. This morning I have decided that from now on I will be following the coding standards set fourth by the Zend Framework. http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/coding-standard.html This is a decision I don't make lightly, and one that ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/adoption-of-coding-standards/ Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a "wicked" problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it (1973).  The paradox implies, essentially, that you have to "solve" the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/design-is-a-wicked-problem/ More and more as of late I have been finding that I do most of my programming at work (as I should), and most of my reading at home.  At any given time I am reading 3 or 4 books, and trying to keep up with numerous blogs.  I have ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/when-do-you-program/ We have a client who is having issues with character encoding.  They recently had a massive content migration and along with the migration came numerous character issues.  They moved from a character set of iso-8859-1 to UTF-8, and with multiple content editors copying/pasting from many different resources (pdf's, Word, Web ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/mysql-replace-rocks/ On the way into work today I saw someone wearing a Yellow chicken suit in front of a Red Lobster restaurant.  In and of itself that isn't much for news, however I almost went off the road when I saw the sign they were holding: Top Frederick (as in Frederick, Maryland, ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/how-do-you-market-your-jobs/ Tomorrow I'm having heart surgery!!  It's really more of a procedure than a surgery, but it does involve doctors going into my heart and making some burns around my Pulmonary veins.  For 8 years now I have lived with Atrial Fibrillation, and tomorrow this procedure will hopefully be the start ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/goodbye-atrial-fibrillation/ In my opinion, an API should be many things. Perhaps the most important thing it should be is easy to use. If it isn't easy to use (because documentation is poor, naming in inconsistent, or because it's just not well thought out or organized) than it will likely ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/07/your-style-guide-is-your-clients-api/ jQuery took what would have been a 4 - 6 hour job ordeal and turned it into 10 minutes of pure enjoyment. Read on. One of our clients at work has a site which is maintained with Dreamweaver (DW) templates and Contribute. If there is anything I have learned about ... http://jasonleveille.com/2008/06/jquery-time-saver/ How cool is this?  A tool to visualize the commit history of a software project.  The project in this case is the Eclipse IDE. code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.   http://jasonleveille.com/2008/06/visualizing-the-commit-history-of-eclipse/