If you are a first-time entrepreneur and likely someone with little experience with software development, the chances of you successfully directing the development of a product on your own, are slim. [...] In software development, too often vision holders hand off a "vision document", i.e. "The Specifications", to a developer and expect him to translate it to the finished product they have in their mind. Most software developers or graphic designers are simply not fit for that role - they do not have the experience, skills or vested interest in transforming your vision to an actual product.

His examples revolve around the idea of outsourcing the development to another group, but a lot of the concepts still apply to in-house development too. He talks some about the idea of "you get what you pay for" when it comes to quality and how much you're willing to pay. He then gets into one of the hardest questions when dealing with development - how to find good developers. He mentions several things that need to be a part of that relationship like trust and good communication.

Let's look at TDD vs. Test whenever. The trade-off being made here is not about quality of code or guarding against regressions. It's about opportunity cost. This had occurred to me but I had dismissed it as being "anti-testing". But I think I was wrong, and here's why.

He talks some about a presentation from Dan North< ("Decisions, Decisions") about when to test (not whether to test or not) and how he noticed his development team was being very productive, but with a "spike and stabilize" development method. He also talks about the concept of "opportunity cost" and how it plays a factor in when tests are introduced to the process.

The key to all this is being able to identify at what stage in this particular pattern your code is at. Is it still a spike, meaning you are working out implementation details and trying to figure out if it will even have the desired result? Or is it stable, providing solid value to the application as a whole and ready to be wrapped in tests to protect against regressions?

The majority of the Coding Horror: Speed Hashing post talks about speed based on MD5. [...] If you are still using MD5 to hash passwords (or worse, aren't hashing passwords at all) then please stop and go use bcrypt. For those using PHP phpass is a great option.

He talks about the crypt method, how its encryption method and "cost" value effects the speed and how difficult it would be to generate all possible hashes for a password (hint: crypt with a cost of 13 is worlds better than md5).

Last week, I began working on something that didn't pan out. For whatever reason, I went down the wrong path, and ultimately abandoned the task I was working on. In discussing it with my boss, he mentioned to me that it was better to realize early on that something wouldn't work than to trudge onward, insisting that it be finished due to the "sunk cost" of the time already spent.

There's two sides to this story - one in which the application continues to be developed and takes up more time (but still ends up as a product) and the other where the time already spent is lost as a completely new approach is taken.

One of the biggest struggles in any software development company is "Buy vs. Build". How do you strike a balance between writing custom software and purchasing off-the-shelf solutions. This is something that is very hard and everyone gets it wrong every once in a while. In this article we will explore the way that Ibuildings approaches this issue, in the hopes that it helps others in getting it right more often.

He talks about considerations made on both sides - how flexible is the application, what is on-hand that could be adapted - and how the base product they might have purchased can act as a based to work from (like a content management system). There's no overall recommendation, though - too much of the decision depends on what's needed at the time and the capabilities of the technical staff employed.

Don't assume that just because you're using an object-oriented framework you are writing reusable and maintainable code. You are just structuring your spaghetti code. [...] The main problem with flexibility is that most developers give up trying to understand. I don't blame them, no one likes dealing with complexity

TO illustrate, he gives two code snippets from two example developers - Developer A makes full use of the framework and takes a more compact approach to the problem while Developer B adds in a bit more checking and takes a different path to the same (basic) end result.

When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more expensive than designing and developing your own Custom Management System.

He breaks it up into sections that look at the hidden costs behind custom development, what components it takes, the environment to build in and some of the fundamental questions you need to ask before even getting started.

From Wez:

Wez also mentions one of his personal views on the whole debate, basically saying that even if PHP is the faster/more efficient, some situations might do better with an ASP.NET solution (what's the cost of implementation?).

They focus mainly on the cost of scalability - whether that be in hardware costs or simply in manhours. He interviews Owen Byrne, Senior Software Engineer for digg.com about some of his decisions on how to handle the explosive growth. They look at what "performance" and "scalability" really are, and some of Byrne's concerns on the matters as it pertains to PHP. They touch briefly on a few topics, including the hardware cost, the database cost, and the actual PHP coding cost of applications.

It turns out that it really is fast and cheap to develop applications in PHP. Most scaling and performance challenges are almost always related to the data layer, and are common across all language platforms. Even as a self-proclaimed PHP evangelist, I was very startled to find out that all of the theories I was subscribing to were true. There is simply no truth to the idea that Java is better than scripting languages at writing scalable web applications. I won't go as far as to say that PHP is better than Java, because it is never that simple. However it just isn't true to say that PHP doesn't scale.

Pass it on...]]> Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:09:28 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4618 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4618 Jim Plush has a list of sites that have "popped up" to decode Zend encoded files.

I have yet to find a response by anyone from Zend on this matter but it seems sites are popping up all over the place that can decode Zend Encoded scripts. Since my company is a customer of this product and rely on this product I'm quite scared as to the slowness of Zend's response.

Some of the sites listed are:

• phpdecode.com
• phprecovery.com
• zic-recovery.com

Of course, of the ones he lists, only one might be a free service. Otherwise, the prices range widly from $15 USD all the way up to $2000 USD.]]> Fri, 06 Jan 2006 06:56:23 -0600