programming

Or, What does "scale" really mean?

If you interact with technical people, you will inevitably hear the word scale. They will say something like, "it doesn't scale well", or, "we need to make sure that this can scale up". Maybe you aren't sure what this means, but you nodded your head anyway. Well, let me tell you what they are talking about.

I'm on the intertubes!

Recently, I made two presentations at the Western MA Drupal Camp. One presentation was for people new to Drupal and the other was a very advanced look at the framework for database administrators. I have posted my slides on the camp website. Also, the first presentation was streamed live and is available for viewing. Feel free to take a look at the links below.

The setup

Recently, I did some pro-bono consulting work for a client. As part of our agreement I made it clear that I would retain the rights to the code I wrote. The reason I did this is because I wanted to be able to give back to the community, and now I am going to do that. The work was made up of six tasks, ranging from trivial to complex. I intend to write six articles based on these tasks. This is the first.

What is Unit Testing?

In simple terms, unit testing is a definition of tests to run on your code. Usually, these tests are automated. The "unit" in unit testing means that the tests should test the smallest functional units, like functions or methods. However, unit testing does not have to be limited to only testing small parts; it can also test interactions between parts with complex combinations and variables, and even test some visual elements, like whether or not a certain image is actually shown or if a class was applied to an XHTML tag.

Here is another tip from "Mistakes I've Made". Don't mix up your conditions and assignments. In other words be careful about using assignment operators (like the eqauls sign '=') inside of conditional statements. Although this happened with PHP, the same problem can occur with many other languages. Let me explain...

Here is a very common way to loop:

Below you will find my description of how I made a new component for Drupal's webform module that dynamically displays a selection of checkboxes. I will go over why I made it. Then I will explain the code step by step. I have also attached a copy of the file for download.