Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Today I was working with trying to map MIME types to file extensions. You can probably guess that the meaning of file extensions overlaps. The MIME type system was an attempt to fix that by providing more specific information about the data format. Unfortunately we couldn’t get that right either.

I was talking to a client today who has business plans that revolve around harvesting data from web sites. How do you do it? Here’s my step-by-step process:
1) Crawl for links
2) Fetch link content
3) Index link content
4) Transform link content
If you design your system that way, you end up with something that can be scaled [...]

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