Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Grouped tags and categories

Just a quick update on something that I wanted to do for quite a while now – I’ve joined the display of tags and categories.  They are still separated in the back-end for me to manage the posts easier.  I just figured out that for site visitors there’s no practical difference, and thus using two user interface elements where one can do the job is not ideal.  The code snippet that helped me do that was borrowed (and slightly modified) from this Codex page.  The only two change that I did were:

  • Skip the General category (or All, as it’s labeled in this case), since all posts belong to it anyway.
  • Skip post format taxonomy (as those are already encoded with post styling – colors and titles).

I’ve also thrown a copyright into the footer and a small welcome box to the sidebar, but those are just cosmetics.

CakeFest 2014 : a look back

Disclaimer:  I’ve written this post a few days after I came back from CakeFest 2014.  Unfortunately, it is unfinished, and by now I have completely lost hope of ever finishing it.  My main excuse is that the first day after CakeFest was my first working day at my new job, which completely and totally consumed me for a few months.  And now, it seems like CakeFest 2014 was a few decades ago.  Mostly I wanted to do two things here: list all the talks with videos and slides, which has probably been done by other people by now, and tell everyone that this was one of the best events I’ve ever attended.  For those who haven’t been to one, I strongly recommend getting a ticket to CakeFest 2015, which will take place end of May in New York, USA.  End of Disclaimer.

 

It’s been a week since I came from Madrid, where I’ve attended CakeFest 2014, a conference dedicated to CakePHP framework.  Now that I’ve caught up on sleep, calmed down, and cleared out my mailbox, I have a few minutes to look back at the event and share my thoughts and impressions.

CakeFest2014

For those of you who are too busy to read the whole thing, here’s the executive summary.  I had very high expectations of the conference way before I went.  I knew there will be one or two core developers.  I knew that there were previous events before.  And I do usually expect high quality stuff from the CakePHP community.  But as I high as my expectations were, the event went through the roof!  It was an absolutely amazing couple of days, where I met a lot of cool people, learned a lot, and had plenty of fun!  If you missed this year’s conference and you are involved in any shape or form with CakePHP, make sure you attend the next year one.  Start making your arrangements now.  You can thank me later.

Now for the long story…

Continue reading CakeFest 2014 : a look back

Docracy – free legal documents

Docracy – free legal documents, or as they describe it on their website:

the web’s only open collection of legal contracts and the best way to negotiate and sign documents online

Very handy for things likes contracts, proposals, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Data Gravity

On the drive back home today I was listening to DevOps Cafe podcast, episode 59.  I’ve recently subscribed to this show and I think this was the first episode of it I ever heard.  It’s one of many tech talk podcasts, where two or more people chat for a varied period of time on a selection of topics, mostly related to technology.

In this particular episode, program hosts John and Damon were interviewing the CTO of Basho – Dave McCrory.  I wasn’t familiar with either Basho or Dave prior to the episode.  Gladly, a somewhat lengthy introduction by Dave gave me a good idea who he is.  What followed though was way more interesting – a discussion about data.

To be completely honest with you, I haven’t even finished the episode yet (got home right in the middle of it), but I feel like it’s one of those worth blogging about.  For one, I’ve learned a new term – “data lake”.  Apparently, that’s a new and fancy way of branding “data warehousing”.  Here is a bit from TechTarget, for example:

A data lake is a storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed.

While a hierarchical data warehouse stores data in files or folders, a data lake uses a flat architecture to store data. Each data element in a lake is assigned a unique identifier and tagged with a set of extended metadata tags. When a business question arises, the data lake can be queried for relevant data, and that smaller set of data can then be analyzed to help answer the question.

The term data lake is often associated with Hadoop-oriented object storage.

But that was just the beginning.  What followed was a fascinating discussion on Data Gravity.  Obviously, this whole thing is too fresh in my mind and I can’t formulate it well yet, so I suggest you listen to the episode and read the intro on the Data Gravity site.  For the sake of brevity:

[…] it’s also a misleading term. Behind it all is the notion that data which is near other data is more useful, and the tendency of data to cling together comes from the usefulness of the resulting knowledge. […]

A lot of it seems obvious, but here it’s all put into a nice thought framework, with references to other, more established fields, like math and physics.  Easily one of the most interesting technology related discussions I’ve heard in a while!