My Portfolio
A quick post to mention I’ve added a portfolio page to my blog with some of the sites I’ve worked on in my current job at Five by Five.
Neil Crookes
Learnings and Teachings on Web Application Development & CakePHP
Aug
31
Aug
30
Coding Style Guide
The coding style guide I’ve put in place at work to enhance the quality, legibility and maintainability of the code produced by my team. Based heavily on the CakePHP Coding Standards, with a few additional guidelines I’ve found important.
Aug
30
The Programmer’s Manifesto
A list of 10 things to help improve the quality of yours and your team’s code, such as sticking to a coding style guide, testing, commenting your code, adding commit messages, staying DRY, performance and security, being MVC strict, keeping track of your time and making use of your down time.
Jul
26
Selling Agile to clients
The world of software development has changed. The world of web development is catching up. Agile is the future, waterfall is past – but persuading clients can be tricky.
This post is all about how to persuade a client that Agile is not only right for them, its the only sensible choice, with a few facts and sample answers to their inevitable questions.
Jul
9
Introduction to Agile Practices
Heard a lot about this Agile melarkey? Wondered what it involves? This post explains the processes and practices in running a project using an Agile approach.
It covers the concepts of the approach, explains the processes involved. Describes the meetings (or ceremonies) you should have, what to discuss and what their outcomes should be. It also explains who should do what, and when.
Jul
1
WordPress rating plugin performance issue
I noticed pages on my blog were loading a bit slowly, make that ridiculously slowly, sometimes 25 seconds or more. I know my dedicated server is pretty old and low tech now, but 25 seconds! That’s crazy. So I decided to dig around and find out why.
(8 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5, rated) Jun
30
When specs don’t work
When estimating for a project that you’re not sure you’re going to be awarded, you don’t want to spend too much time analysing the minutiae in the spec. So what do you do when you’ve won it, you’re half way through building it, and you stumble across a small, but fundamental problem?
May
20
Tolerant Project Estimates
Software developers will always be asked to estimate for work, so that project costs, timescales and resource requirements can be planned. Much as you’d like to just get on and build a web application, this, unfortunately, is a fact of life.
If your estimates are wildly under actual times, there can be repercussions. If you work for yourself you’ll most likely take a hit on the profit you’ll make on a project. If you work for someone else, your boss might not be too happy as the company has taken that hit.
This post talks about how to estimate, types of estimate (with a section on ballparks) and how you can manage the use and interpretation of estimates you provide.
May
6
Managing feature additions and bug fixes with Subversion
So, you’ve finished working on the initial release of an application and it goes live. At a later date you have to add an additional feature, sometimes more than one, but before these can go live, they require testing and approval.
Sometimes, the client wants subsequently implemented feature additions deployed before earlier ones. What happens if these involve changes to the same files?
In the meantime, bugs in the live application are identified and need fixing and deploying immediately, but these require changes to files that you’ve already changed for a feature addition, that is not ready to go live yet, and if it did, would break the application!
Sound familiar, if so, read on for a solution.
Apr
26
Web Application Admin System Security
Design patterns for increased security of the admin area of a web application, explaining the idea and then the implementation.