Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

Find out if your project has the tell-tale signs of disaster.

I run a lot of Ruby daemons and web servers for them. Managing all those init.d scripts was harder until I realized that I didn’t have to learn bash/sh to do it. I could write my init.d scripts in Ruby. Well that improved things, but now I’m caught once again in the middle of rolling [...]

I’m building PrestoScript in Ruby and the more I get into it, the less I am in anyone’s framework but my own. Why is that? Is there a certain class of problems that are frameworkless? I’ve been thinking lately that generalized frameworks could be a farce. I always explain to clients that Ruby on Rails [...]

ActiveRecord is one of the hidden treasures of the Rails framework from which Rails derives so much of its productivity. It features beautiful uses of the Ruby language, especially Ruby’s dynamic programming features.
ActiveRecord also makes it easy to be inefficient though. Efficient data access is not something that happens magically, and if ActiveRecord is left [...]

I was working on a PHP app today. Just a plain old, nothing fancy, queries-right-in-the-code, edit-it-live-on-the-server PHP app. And you know what? I got shit done.

I’ve been talking with more clients lately about Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) is not dead, oh no, not dead at all. I’m not sure how PHP’s Joomla compares with a CMS like DotNetNuke, but my suspicion is that Joomla is far more widely used and probably has more modules and plugins too simply [...]

I’ve had this idea for a while that the principles of Test-Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) could be applied to everyday living with spectacular results. Below is an untested adaptation of TDD principles to life.

erlang is a programming language that is supposed to be very scalable. It encourages a form of design that is naturally scalable and as such requires some degree of adjustment for many programmers. The whole idea doesn’t sit well with me.

I tripped across this link the other day. It describes my thinking about software design:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

I’ve been doing so much work in WordPress lately that I invented a better way to modify a WordPress site with custom programming. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress, requires no modifications to core code, and is fully testable. Go find out more about it at the home page