Category Archives: PHP

Scrum: How we do Sprint Retrospectives

Four weeks have passed since the last sprint planning meeting. Sprint number two has come to an end. It’s time for the sprint retrospective. The motivation for the sprint retrospective is: Visualize the accomplishment – important for the team morale … Continue reading

Posted in Management, PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged | 4 Comments

Implementing scrum at tilllate.com

The first sprint is done! Yes we finally started doing Scrum at tilllate.com*. Well, it’s not exactly how Schwaber and Sutherland would expect it. But our way fits our team. And the acceptance in both the IT team and the … Continue reading

Posted in Management, PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged | 5 Comments

Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared

When displaying an e-mail address on a webpage you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test with 10 methods. Here are the results. Continue reading

Posted in PHP, Web Development | Tagged , | 128 Comments

Round Robin Data Storage in MySQL

If you want to store large amount of volatile data (e.g. log file entries) in a database with a constant storage memory footprint and no maintenance to purge the old entries, a round robin database is the best solution. But … Continue reading

Posted in Database, PHP | Tagged | 14 Comments

Unit testing makes coding more fun

“unit testing is a test that validates that individual units of source code are working properly”, that’s what Wikipedia says about unit testing. That’s general knowledge. But what motivates me even more than the increased software quality is that it … Continue reading

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Unit test practice at tilllate.com

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I’d like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests. In our … Continue reading

Posted in PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Squid and Mysql metric scripts for Ganglia

After a long day of meetings and other tedious manager work the perfect way to relax is to code. The best is a mini-projects where you see your results after an hour or so. I call these tasks “Plausch-Projekte” (“plah-oosh … Continue reading

Posted in IT Infrastructure, PHP, Programming | 10 Comments

Sharedance, Memcached and Cache_Lite

With 125 million page impressions a month and highly dynamic content, caching is essential for tilllate.com. At tilllate, we have worked with several different caching techniques. Before we used caching, we just pre-generated the data: A nightly cron job populates … Continue reading

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