There are many theories on how software should be developed, probably several for each programming language that exists. Some approaches go in and out of vogue, whereas the applicability of others greatly depends upon the language in use or the complexity of the application being written. This is why I was so happy to discover Scott Mattocks’s work on what he calls " LUCID development".

I recently read this short but awesome post titled " Be Productive with the MySQL Command Line". In the post, the author Stephane Combaudon, presents three extremely useful tips for when you’re using the command-line MySQL client. The first two in particular are invaluable to me.

I am thrilled to say that I have accepted a position as a Support Engineer at Stripe. Here are the why’s and how’s of my decision.

TL:DR Version: Stripe consists of brilliant, wonderful, accomplished people doing great things. And I’ll still complete the books I’m writing.

About Stripe

In case you’re not familiar with the company, “Stripe makes it easy to start accepting credit cards on the web today” (from Stripe’s web site). That’s really it, but it’s quite an accomplishment. As is always the case, it’s quite hard to do something simple right.

If you’ve done e-commerce before, you know how hard it can be to integrate the payment processing. For example, to accept credit cards, you have to find a payment gateway and setup a merchant account. And if the card data is going through your server, you’ve got to do your due diligence to maintain PCI compliance. PCI compliance can be hard, time consuming, and expensive.

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Although I’m able to charge a nice hourly rate, I’m all too aware that vast amounts of what I do doesn’t map to an hourly charge to any client. A considerable amount of my time is spent (in no particular order):

• Writing blog posts
• Replying to blog comments
• Answering support forum questions
• Dabbling in social media
• Doing my company accounting
• Reading and replying to email

While some, if not all, of these actions may financially benefit me in terms of selling more books, there’s no direct monetary association for them, and they take a considerable amount of time to perform. Time that could be better spent billing clients!

Of this list, too much time is spent in email. I suspect that’s something we can all attest to. The ironic problem with optimizing the efficiency of your routines is that you have to find the time to do so. Fortunately, I just recently read Nikil Viswanathan’s post " How to Win at Email".

I’m very happy to say that I’ll be speaking at the 2013 Northeast PHP Conference, taking place in Boston on August 16-18. This is the second year of the Northeast PHP Conference, and my first year attending. I’ve heard excellent things about last year’s event, and am thrilled to be participating. I’m also fortunate enough to know several people in the Boston PHP community now, so it’ll be great to see them again.

I’ve actually been selected to do three presentations, all of which are new for me (I’ll be pretty busy in July!). Those presentations are…

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• Q&A => How do you optimize a database?
• On the Web => 15 Pro-tips for MySQL Users
• On the Web => How to lose weight (in the browser)
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “The Yii Book”