A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
Daniel Göransson, a web developer with vision impairment, put together this ultimate guide to the image alt texts. Unlike all the keyword stuffing SEO guides, his focuses on making alt texts useful for people who are using screen readers and other assisting technologies.
If you’ve never browsed the web with a screen reader switched on, this guide is the next best thing for you to understand the issues and make your sites better.
This Hacker News thread is full of tips, tricks, and references to reducing Amazon AWS costs. There is plenty of good advice from cleaning up the data and releasing unused resources, to monitoring the reserved instances usage, to moving data from elastic volumes to the Amazon S3 for cheaper storage and smaller traffic bills.
Percona Database Performance Blog runs this post – MySQL vs. MariaDB: Reality Check – comparing the MySQL, MariaDB and the Percona Server for MySQL. I think that most people using MySQL or MariaDB today consider them to be pretty much identical (a fork for legal reasons or something along those lines). This blog post shows that there are quite a few significant differences.
“Turning vim into an IDE through vim plugins” is yet another take on customizing the Vim text editor and making it into a full featured IDE. Most of these things were possible for years (I even had my own blog post on the subject), but with every version of Vim it gets easier and easier to setup a more advanced developer environment.
As you might know, I am a big fan of GraphViz. I’ve used numerous times for visualizing different parts of the project code and dependencies (see here and here for example).
Today I came across a way to visualize PHP objects (not just classes) – object-graph library by Sebastian Bergmann, and I think it’s pretty cool. If you are working on top of a PHP framework like CakePHP and Laravel, I suspect your object diagrams will get quite huge, but for more modular applications and libraries it should do the job just fine.