Fast PHP – effective optimisation and bottleneck detection
PHP is not the fastest language on earth. That honour probably goes to machine code. But like many high-level languages, PHP provides some handy abstractions, like named variables, hashmaps...
View ArticleXKCD Colour Survey – a 3D visualisation
Randall Munroe (of XKCD) has been running a “name the colour” survey for the last few months and today released the data. The results are broken down by gender, and he makes some fascinating...
View ArticleCaching in Javascript with Cachejs
Here’s a useful open-source (MIT license) javascript caching object I developed for my job at GG.com, the best horse racing site on the net. (I am contractually obliged to say that every time I mention...
View ArticleFast PHP array_unique for removing duplicates
PHP’s native dedupe function, array_unique, can be slow for large amount of input. Here I’m going to talk about a simple function that performs the same task but which runs a lot faster. Often, people...
View ArticleSome thoughts on JavaScript
I don’t know about you, but I grew up doing image rollovers in JS and other groundbreaking “dhtml” stuff. Since then CSS has evolved, web standards and browsers have evolved, and things are much much...
View ArticleSome tweetable #js1k demos
JS1k is consuming me at the moment. I saw this entry by strager and it inspired me to push for a tweetable (<=140 byte) demo based on his. By dropping the save/restore and alpha blending features, I...
View ArticleJS1k Winners – Top Ten Entries
So, the JS1k contest is over and the winners are finally in! What a fantastic event this has been, massive thanks to all the organisers and judges, and to all the entrants for putting on a great show,...
View ArticleOverloading in PHP
Murray Picton wrote up a blog post today on overloading functions in PHP. Overloading is a useful feature of many languages. Murray gives a nice definition in his post: Overloading a function is the...
View ArticlePoking holes in PHP object privacy
PHP provides a decent model of class member visibility, with public, private, and protected members to help you define tight APIs for your objects and show other developers how your object is supposed...
View ArticleThree Neat JavaScript Tips
JavaScript is a great language. It really can power your entire web stack from animated effects on the frontend to ajax calls for faster user experiences, to backend JSON APIs written in NodeJS. It’s...
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