In his latest post, Stefan Koopmanschap shares an interesting idea he thinks more software developers would do well to adopt - Use what you can (or "don't do it yourself).

In her book, Amanda Palmer talks about DIY, and how when you start asking for help, Do It Yourself is a strange term. Instead, she suggests UWYC, which stands for Use What You Can. I think software developers can learn a lot from this mindset. As Palmer says: "I have no interest in Doing It Myself." This is exactly how we should approach software development.

He points out that, for the most part, the tasks and needs of most software have been solved. There already exists functionality to do those things, so why would you need to create your own? By doing so, you only increase your load as a developer, shifting the hard work of maintenance and improvement into your already loaded work schedule. He does make a good suggestion for using other people's code, though: filter the solutions (according to criteria like following good practices, documentation and if it's in active development).

As a former ASP.Net coder, I've missed the convenience of Microsoft's built-in Calendar Control since I switched to doing Web site development in PHP. On a recent project I needed the ability to display a calendar with dates serving as hyperlinks to selected database items. I decided to use the opportunity to write some portable PHP code that I could use in other projects.

So started Donald McArthur's work on creating a simple, easy to use calendaring system to be used in a popup inside an application. He provides all the code you'll need - the PHP code and the HTML layout/functionality you'll need to get it working.

He helps you visualize the structure of the end result HTML table with a simpler version (three cells by five cells) and explains the date functions the code uses to figure out the dates and days of the selected month.

As a former ASP.Net coder, I've missed the convenience of Microsoft's built-in Calendar Control since I switched to doing Web site development in PHP. On a recent project I needed the ability to display a calendar with dates serving as hyperlinks to selected database items. I decided to use the opportunity to write some portable PHP code that I could use in other projects.

So started Donald McArthur's work on creating a simple, easy to use calendaring system to be used in a popup inside an application. He provides all the code you'll need - the PHP code and the HTML layout/functionality you'll need to get it working.

He helps you visualize the structure of the end result HTML table with a simpler version (three cells by five cells) and explains the date functions the code uses to figure out the dates and days of the selected month.