I just got invited to a creative workshop that is supposed to synchronise ideas about a future product. When this workshop got announced it was announced to far too many people in the room with more than necessary kinds of experience. The idea was to be brainstorming.

With no clear goal..

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Creativity · Workshop

Managing is a lot about reporting. Either you need to report to someone or you need to get reports to base your decisions on some facts. Preparing such reports is tedious though and can be automated.

I’ve chosen Google Docs for it.

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automation · Google Analytics · Google Docs · reporting

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – the lamp stack is commonly used throughout the internet. But it is only part of your technology stack, the list goes further. The PHP extensions, your framework of choice, some NoSQL solution and a messaging queue, a thick varnish or squid layer, preprocessors like LESS and Coffeescript, HTML boilerplates, CSS frameworks, javascript libraries and client data storage solutions and a whole lot more. Each layer of your stack comes with the features you chose it for.

Using these features could become a problem though..

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architecture

Everybody who ever had to translate Photoshop designs into CSS must’ve thought at some point that this tedious work should be automated. Now long after my coding days a solution seems to exist.

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CSS · LESS · SASS

Lately I get in touch with quite a few startup ideas. Since I am working for a publisher most of these ideas revolve around some form of digital journalism. They want to have a website, something readable on desktops, tablets and smartphones. Oh and they don’t have any technical skills nor too much money.

So I say WordPress.

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CMS · Wordpress

After months of no coding at all I found some time to write a bit of code again. As soon as I’m done with it I will probably blog about it but for now I want to share a cool best practice ressource for javascript in general and jQuery in particular.

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best practice · Javascript · JQuery

When you need to create something from scratch you usually try to achieve your goal with off the shelve software in order to get a head start and to benefit from its maturity. You choose software by matching it against your requirements.

Sometimes though you should adapt your requirements to available software.

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Evaluation · requirements

I just stumbled upon a news on VentureBeat saying PHP developers can now build mobile apps from their IDE. In PHP! This sounds as if you can code in PHP which then will be transformed into native code.

But it’s not working like that.

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mobile · PHP · zend

“Why do we need our software to be proprietary at all?” I was asked by my boss a couple of weeks ago. And by proprietary she meant things built on our own instead of taking something from the shelve.

I’m sure there are good reasons for being proprietary.

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requirements · Software Development

Over the past few days I have been spending some free time to put up a new blog for a friend of mine who want to start a new business. Because having just a blog isn’t enough infrastructure I setup a few Google Apps as well.

I was surprised how well integrated everything feels by now.
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Google Apps · Google+