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.

Publishers Haven’t Realized Just How Big a Deal GDPR is

Lately, I feel like I’m behaving very similar to Steve Ballmer, running around screaming “GDPR! GDPR! GDPR!”.

But I find it to be a huge change for anyone around Europe, and I see it coming into play very soon, and most of the people around me are mostly like “GDPR? What’s that?”.

This article does a lot of good explaining how big of a deal it is.  And it doesn’t matter whether you support this or totally against it, I think it will be a huge change for everyone all around.  In particularly so – technical people implementing the necessary changes.

PHP Static Analysis

Here are a couple of new tools in addition to previously mentioned PHPStan:

  • Psalm by Vimeo.  The cool thing about this static analyzer is that it supports both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7, unlike PHPStan which requires PHP 7.  (Yeah, I know PHP 5.6 has reached the end of its active support a while back, but there are still quite a few projects around using it.) Additionally, Psalm is easy to control via the XML configuration file,  much like PHPUnit and PHP CodeSniffer.
  • Phan.  This one is a bit trickier to install, as it requires some PHP extensions that I’ve never heard about (like PHP AST).

Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

Here are a couple of bits that I liked in “Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity” blog post:

How can someone be 10x more productive than his peers without being noticed? In some professions such a difference would be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. Sales are easy to measure, and some salesmen make orders of magnitude more money than others. If a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers this would be obvious too, but it doesn’t happen: the best bricklayers cannot lay 10x as much brick as average bricklayers. Software output cannot be measured as easily as dollars or bricks. The best programmers do not necessarily write 10x as many lines of code and they certainly do not work 10x longer hours.

Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code.

… and:

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”