Ever worked for a company that equips all of their employees with the same tools (those with the same job description of course)? This is how we work here. You have to use this IDE and that virtual machine player.

Ever switched to your favorite tool instead?

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Standards

Last weekend Bernhard wrote a new blog post on the official Symfony blog about the revamped form component in Symfony 2.1 and apparently it’s no longer backwards compatible. This is not really surprising as not everything in 2.0 was marked stable not was everything included in that release that is meant to go into Symfony.

Still BC breaks like this should make you think before you act.

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symfony

Yesterday I was introduced to Hogan.js the templating library from twitter. It was new to me so I had a look at the documentation and I think I know when I would use it.

And when I would not.

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Javascript

At work I am currently looking at the services of Plista, a German company providing interesting new advertising formats. Nothing really new but still interesting. Unfortunately they don’t offer a simple trial without getting in touch.

But their US predecessor Outbrain does so I implemented them on testically.

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outbrain

I am currently playing with some javascript on a little idea that I had. It’s basically all about client-side templating and I decided to use Zepto.js (tiny drop in replacement jQuery) together with ICanHaz.js. Following links on the ICanHaz.js website I found the company &yet where I stumbled upon another great little tool doing form validation.

Happy.js

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Javascript

When you change something that other stuff depends on you might have to deal with this stuff being broken. Only sometimes it’s hard to understand why things break when there was no good reason for it.

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Code Quality · XML

I love my Google Chrome browser especially since it syncs all my bookmarks, plugins and settings to wherever I use it. Now I just discovered a new extension that will ease my life a lot.

A terminal emulator.

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Google Chrome · shell

I work for content websites. Magazine and news sites to be more specific. Of course our titles are available on tables and smartphones as well and a topic that comes naturally is responsive web design.

It promises one product on all devices. But does it deliver?

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mobile · responsive web design · tablet · web

Last week I was invited into a discussion by our development team. Having been a developer as well as a system architect they wanted me to share an opinion about the perfect fit branching model. Judging by the number of diagrams drawn my colleagues had been at it for quite some time.

I’m not sure if the opinion I shared was what they expected though.

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Git · Subversion

Yesterday I spoke to a colleague of mine. He specializes in mobile technology and was approached to define the standard UI framework to use in order to use that one in all our mobile activities. Selecting a standard technology would reduce the effort to manage it thus saving  costs.

He didn’t feel comfortable to reply and so wouldn’t I.

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Javascript · mobile · Standards