Tom's Third Law: When in Rome, Do as the Romans
or Have Good Coding Standards Laws don't get any more straightforward than this one. If you're making changes to a piece of code that someone else has written, make your code look like theirs. Use the...
View ArticleTom's Fourth Law: With Power Comes Complexity
Software that does something very simple is usually (usually) very simple to develop. Software that does something complex is usually very difficult to develop, and therefore usually very difficult to...
View ArticleTom's Fifth Law: User Interfaces Should Look and Feel Native
If you're building an application that will run on Windows, it should look, feel and behave like a standard Windows application. If you're building an application that will run on some flavor of *nix,...
View ArticleTom's Sixth Law: He Who Has the Best Duck Wins
The best way to solve a difficult problem is to talk it through. I for one talk to myself regularly, but problem solving talk-throughs require an independent audience in order to be effective; your...
View ArticleQuick and Dirty How-to: Showing Projects from DonorsChoose.org with PHP and AJAX
While developing the Memory Lane application, I decided I wanted to list projects from DonorsChoose.org on the app's main page. Given their convenient API, this seemed like an easy way to support a...
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