A few days ago I went and registered the domain dashto.cc and created a really quick-n-dirty URL shortening site. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I want to talk about regular expressions (usually referred to as regex or regexp). No matter what application you are creating, chances are you will need to parse text in some way. It might be for validating user input or for extracting information from a string of data in some arbitrary format. I have yet to work on any project where regex was not required. Read the rest of this entry »
After months of wanting to start a developers blog, and after months of putting it off, I’ve finally got around to setting everything up. So here it is.
I want to give a little background information on this little endeavor of mine. I first started playing around with the idea about a year ago. I had just solved a really annoying problem in a project I was working on. You know the kind: something that was supposed to be simple, but ends up taking entirely too much time. I remember thinking that in hindsight the solution was simple. That’s just how things work isn’t it?
Afterwards I thought, “I wonder how many people I could help if I were to write about what I’ve just learned.” This line of reasoning led me to the idea of Devlog. On the many topics I plan to cover in the coming months and (hopefully) years, I really want to add a few gems that you won’t find anywhere else.
There are an overabundance of tutorials online pertaining to web development, but there are some topics I don’t see covered much. There are lots of how-to’s ranging from rounded corners with CSS to CAPTCHA images with PHP. Out of the thousands and thousands of sites, there are some pretty key topics of discussion that really seem to be lacking. You might find a tutorial on how to connect to a database using PHP but it never goes into much detail about things like SQL injection or keeping stored information safe. It is these kinds of forgotten but important subjects I want to cover.
The first topic, unfortunately, will not be the aforementioned “annoying problem.” After all this time and after countless other “annoying problems,” I cannot seem to remember the exact one that ignited the cascade of thoughts that led me here. Good thing there are always more problems to be solved!
So that about wraps up this first introductory post on the brand new Devlog. I cannot guarantee any consistent posting time line, but I will do my best to try and provide some fresh content every once and while. With RSS readers so popular these days, no doubt you can just add the Devlog feed to your client and never worry about it until there’s something new and interesting to read.
Until next time, happy coding!