In this recent post to his site Henrik Warne has shared a list of advice around software development and some good practices he's picked up along the way.

Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years.

His list includes several points related to a few main categories:

• Development
• Troubleshooting
• Cooperation (personal, not code)
• Other Miscellaneous Tips

Each main topic has a few sub-topics and each of those includes a brief description (with twenty-two tips in the list overall). There's some great advice in the list as well as some good contributions in the comments, so be sure to read through those too.

Laura Thomson, a trued and true PHP and self-proclaimed as the "only person in the PHP blogosphere who hasn't said something about Ruby On Rails" has tried the language out and has posted about some of her thoughts today.

We've been working for a while on a RoR project. Originally it came in as a really high concept idea - the spec was more like a film treatment than a functional spec. [...] So we set out to build a prototype in six weeks. We are known as a PHP shop, although of our web dev, about half is in PHP and the other half in Perl. At the time we had working for us a very talented Rails guru, so we thought we'd give it a try.

Unfortunately, their "Rails Guru" moved on to more Ruby pastures so they've been left with maintaining the application. Laura, being one of the team, has learned a few things about the language that's caused an internet craze:

• It makes getting started easy. This is what it's famous for.
• As things get more complicated, the ideal of convention over configuration starts to get in your way.
• The documentation sucks. This is however, improving.
• The community support is really immature.
• Learning to debug apps is really really hard to begin with.

Of course, other things were learned and several books purchased - a learning experience to say the least (including working with a bit of UI design).

Laura Thomson, a trued and true PHP and self-proclaimed as the "only person in the PHP blogosphere who hasn't said something about Ruby On Rails" has tried the language out and has posted about some of her thoughts today.

We've been working for a while on a RoR project. Originally it came in as a really high concept idea - the spec was more like a film treatment than a functional spec. [...] So we set out to build a prototype in six weeks. We are known as a PHP shop, although of our web dev, about half is in PHP and the other half in Perl. At the time we had working for us a very talented Rails guru, so we thought we'd give it a try.

Unfortunately, their "Rails Guru" moved on to more Ruby pastures so they've been left with maintaining the application. Laura, being one of the team, has learned a few things about the language that's caused an internet craze:

• It makes getting started easy. This is what it's famous for.
• As things get more complicated, the ideal of convention over configuration starts to get in your way.
• The documentation sucks. This is however, improving.
• The community support is really immature.
• Learning to debug apps is really really hard to begin with.

Of course, other things were learned and several books purchased - a learning experience to say the least (including working with a bit of UI design).

Off of the Avatar Financial site, there's a great list they've created to share a few things they've learned around a popular PHP framework - more specifically 21 things they've learned about CakePHP.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting

and many more. There's lots of helpful tips here, especially if you're new to CakePHP and want that extra leg up.

Off of the Avatar Financial site, there's a great list they've created to share a few things they've learned around a popular PHP framework - more specifically 21 things they've learned about CakePHP.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting

and many more. There's lots of helpful tips here, especially if you're new to CakePHP and want that extra leg up.