Translating Geek Into English
Yeesh! So where am I behind, and by how much? Let me count the ways…
I haven’t put up a blog posting in almost a month
I haven’t updated the Yii book in two months (ugh!!!)
I haven’t sent out a newsletter in almost three months
But other than that…Oh, I haven’t exercised in four months (in the spring, I had started exercising daily, which I did successfully do for two months). So, where have I been?
Whenever you begin working with a database, you introduce more possible causes of errors. Thus, you must learn additional debugging strategies. When using PHP to run queries on the database, the problems you might encounter include:
An inability to connect to the database
A database error thrown because of a query
The query not returning the results or having the effect that you expect
None of the above, and yet, the output is still incorrect
On a non-framework site, you just need to watch for database errors to catch the first two types of problems. There’s a simple and standard approach for debugging the last two types:
Use PHP to print out the query being run.
Run the same query using another interface to confirm the results.
Debug the query until you get the results you want.
When using a framework, these same debugging techniques are a little less obvious, in part because you may not be directly touching the underlying SQL commands. Thankfully, Yii will still be quite helpful, if you know what switches to flip.
I’m looking ahead to writing Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of “The Yii Book” (I’m currently writing Chapter 19), and was wondering what people wanted me to specifically demonstrate. Originally, I had intended to use the Zend Framework as my example. I like how ZF components can be easily used on their own, and I’d frequently used ZF with my own Yii projects. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Symfony in the chapter. I’ve not touched Symfony yet myself, but have heard good things. Of course, the examples don’t have to use frameworks; they could use any type of library.
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I’ve created a three-part series posted as a guest blogger on the site of my hosting company, ServInt. The series is titled “‘Going Big’ With a Website”, and is based upon a series of newsletters I put out a couple of months back. In the series, I attempt to explain how one should navigate the process of having no site, to having a site, to having an active site, should you be so fortunate. The series isn’t so much about the X’s and O’s (e.g., caching, using gzip, Apache vs. nginx, and so forth), as it is about general philosophies you need to consider in order to best use your limited resources (although there are a few specific recommendations in there).
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On August 17, 2013, at the Northeast PHP conference in Boston, I gave a new presentation titled “How To Get There”. This was a motivational-like presentation, which is virgin territory for me, but I think it turned out well. In the talk, I recommend 21 behaviors and attitudes one should have in order to succeed, in order to achieve one’s goals. The tl;dr version comes down to this:
Be honest. Work hard. Never stop learning.
This is common sense, yes, but often it’s the things that should go without saying that most need to be said.
