It’s easy to think about programming as an exercise of computers, or of languages and design. But at its heart programming is just about people. I bring this up because it’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that people are who you’re really programming for, and I just need a reminder sometimes. Maybe […]
I was pair programming recently, and I had a bit of revelation: programming is just storytelling. I was “leading” at the time, the more experienced of us in the problem space we were in, and my partner seemed to need the most help seeing how all the little bits fit together into a coherent and […]
Programmers can spend a lot of time worrying about, thinking about, and optimizing the way that the code they’re writing looks. Whether it’s language designers obsessing about the way that you’ll find the length of string or language-users sweating about whether the function should be called findClassById() or get_class(), all thinking about naming is arguably […]
Sass lets you code CSS stylesheets the way you would write other software. I just got done with a huge client project that relied heavily on Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass), the CSS preprocessor. Sass, which we’ve written about a few times, lets you code CSS stylesheets the way you would write other software, using functions, variables, inheritance, and […]
We do a lot of PHP work here at Press Up. Not only do we do WordPress, but we use the language on its own for many small projects, and we’ve run more than a few projects built atop of other PHP packages, libraries, and frameworks. PHP is the ugly step-child that every programmer loves to hate, […]
This is a third post exploring applications for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass), the CSS preprocessor that can really turbocharge how you create and modify CSS. Today we’ll be exploring a function called ensureTextContrast() that lets you rest assured that, across two arbitrary font and background color combinations, the font will be light or dark enough […]
This is a second post exploring applications for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass), the CSS preprocessor that can really turbocharge how you create and modify CSS. Here we’ll be looking at a very simple Sass functions I’ve written called rUp, which I think is a generally-better alternative to CSS’s default em specification. The code @function rUp($multiple: […]
404 is the HTTP “Not Found” error code. When a web application receives a request for a resource or page it can’t make sense of, it should return a 404 error and a page that corresponds to that error. You’ve almost certainly seen a 404 page in your life, and you’ll probably see tons more. […]
With a few notable exceptions, software makers hate dealing with preexisting code. Sure, they’re happy to have tools that solve problems they have, but give them a bunch of code that “mostly solved” an existing problem or the opportunity to start over from scratch, and many would blindly pick starting over from scratch. Easy-to-work-with software […]
There are a few commonly-known password sins, in rough order of how I think most people think of them: Writing down your password. Telling someone else your password. Reusing a password. Of these, many people — myself included — were historically led to think that the first is the worst. Back in the old days, […]
One of the most interesting things that I didn’t understand before I really spent much time learning about computers is how passwords work. It seems kind of stupid, but it’s an interesting and important question: how is a site validating that you’re you? The Naivest Possible Password System Well, pretty simply, you can make a […]
Probably the easiest way to sell things online is using PayPal purchase buttons. PayPal buttons can be a good fit in cases when a complicated and full-featured e-commerce solution might be overkill—for example, if you have a very simple single product, like an e-book. One thing you may not have realized is just how customizable […]
