Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

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

So I’m pursuing a goal where my business is automated 100% end to end, from marketing to billing. It’s not easy. You have to automate stuff, then you have to automate monitoring, then you have to automate responses to monitoring. You have to plug all the terminal paths, i.e., any path that leads to human [...]

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 am getting good at setting up the subscription management infrastructure that you need to run a good paid service.

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.

I run the “surgeon” model of development: an expert and one or more assistants.
The first place I read about the surgeon model was in Fred Brooks’ book, Mythical Man Month. In it, he describes a configuration where one expert uses several assistants. The expert tends to ambiguity: high-level crafting, planning, and architecture. The assistants [...]

I use Mac OS X almost exclusively. Here is my list of things I would change.

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

Here’s a topic that comes up a lot. What is a reasonable budget for your web site? $500? $1,000? Six weeks? Eight weeks?
Some of the earliest help I provide for people is determining what this number is.