arkaaito - Developer IT

Growing mobile developers inside a web development org

- by Arkaaito

I work for a "mature web startup" as a web developer (mainly using PHP). Our main site has about 8 million registered members at the moment. However, the site is basically impossible to use on anything that's not a real computer. One of our most-requested features, if not the most requested, is a mobile app or mobile version of the site. I think we need to do it. Management thinks we need to do it. In fact, everyone in the company thinks we need to do it. But it's nigh impossible to hire someone with iPhone/Android skills in the present market. I'm the only person at the company with any level of mobile development experience currently, and I'm not that good (yet), so I'm seeking comments on how to bootstrap a capacity for mobile development. Anything from general tips (should I focus on developing my personal skills first or try to pick up a more experienced mobile dev?) to specific recommendations on training, etc., may be helpful, as long as it doesn't reduce to "sucks to be you." :-)

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One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?

- by Arkaaito

At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?) This has an impact on the productivity (and morale) of engineering staff, self included. Management has spent some time thinking about how to reduce the frequency of these same-day requests and has come up with the solution that we are going to have a release every week. (Previously we'd been doing one every two weeks, which usually slipped by a couple of days or so.) There are 13 developers and 6 local / 9 offshore testers; the theory is that only 4 developers (and all testers) will work on even-numbered releases, unless a piece of work comes up that really requires some specific expertise from one of the other devs. Each cycle will contain two days of dev work and two days of QA work (plus 1 day of scoping / triage / ...). My questions are: (a) Does anyone have experience with this length of release cycle? (b) Has anyone heard of this length of release cycle even being attempted? (c) If (a) or (b), how on Earth do you make it work? (Any pitfalls to avoid, etc., are also appreciated.) (d) How can we minimize the damage if this effort fails?

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Tips for / pitfalls of working on an outsourced project

- by Arkaaito

My company has retained an outside firm to develop an iPhone app for us. As the only internal developer with any knowledge of Objective-C, I've been assigned to develop the relevant APIs on our site, but also to do anything I can to make sure the whole thing comes together on time. Any suggestions for things I should do or things I should watch out for, particularly from those who've been down this road before?

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What proportion of DBA skills are platform-independent?

- by Arkaaito

Problem: we've grown to the point where we need a real DBA. Real DBAs are hard to find. Possible solution: I know someone with extensive experience (currently working on MSSQL) who is looking for a new DBA job. He might be willing to consider working for a MySQL shop (I haven't asked). Snag: I don't know to what extent MSSQL DBA skills map to MySQL DBA skills. I'm a developer, so I know enough about MySQL to develop apps which use it (including the basic performance-tuning, index selection, etc.), do schema design, and perform simple utility tasks (backup with mysqldump, scripting, etc.). I don't know anything about MSSQL. Nor do I actually know much about the boundaries of the DBA role. Can anyone with more experience - perhaps as a DBA - weigh in on this? Are there enough similarities between MSSQL and MySQL that it's worth asking a MSSQL DBA if he'd be interested in applying for a MySQL position?

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Vista: "connect to a network" does not load (can't set up VPN)

- by Arkaaito

I'm trying to connect to my office VPN from home. One small problem: my home desktop uses Vista (64-bit, Ultimate edition). On Vista, you're supposed to set up a VPN like so: Open the control panel Click on Network Click on "Connect to a Network" Configure a new connection of type "Office" The problem is, when I click on the link for "Connect to a Network", nothing happens. Can anyone suggest how I should go about troubleshooting this? (Or am I better off just upgrading to Windows 7?)

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What causes memcache to delete keys?

- by Arkaaito

Our memcache install recently started removing keys, and we're not sure why. Large groups of keys vanish at the same time. Memcache reports that evictions are low to non-existent, and our app has no way to clear memcache (it can only delete specific keys). Even keys of which the app has no knowledge get deleted, so we're pretty convinced they're getting expired. However, our memcache configuration hasn't been touched in some time. Has anyone debugged an issue like this before, and if so, are there any steps you'd recommend we take? How flexible is memcache's expiration policy - is it possible that we're suddenly running into a criterion based on (say) write frequency to a key?

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How can I create an AMI from an existing EC2 instance?

- by Arkaaito

(I suspect that this may already be answered somewhere, since it seems like it would be a common operation. But I can't find it, so...) I am a relative AWS newbie. I have inherited a running Amazon EC2 instance, with various items (Apache, MySQL, Sphinx, ...) installed on it and a bunch of configuration. I'd like to turn it into an AMI that I can spin up other instances from. I can't find any information on creating a custom AMI on Amazon's site - only the fact that you can, repeatedly referenced, as if to taunt me... I believe this is not an EBS-backed instance, just an "ordinary" one. I do not know what AMI it was originally created from. How would I create an AMI that I could use for spinning up other instances which will be identical except for the hostname?

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Source of parsers for programming languages?

- by Arkaaito

I'm dusting off an old project of mine which calculates a number of simple metrics about large software projects. One of the metrics is the length of files/classes/methods. Currently my code "guesses" where class/method boundaries are based on a very crude algorithm (traverse the file, maintaining a "current depth" and adjusting it whenever you encounter unquoted brackets; when you return to the level a class or method began on, consider it exited). However, there are many problems with this procedure, and a "simple" way of detecting when your depth has changed is not always effective. To make this give accurate results, I need to use the canonical way (in each language) of detecting function definitions, class definitions and depth changes. This amounts to writing a simple parser to generate parse trees containing at least these elements for every language I want my project to be applicable to. Obviously parsers have been written for all these languages before, so it seems like I shouldn't have to duplicate that effort (even though writing parsers is fun). Is there some open-source project which collects ready-to-use parser libraries for a bunch of source languages? Or should I just be using ANTLR to make my own from scratch? (Note: I'd be delighted to port the project to another language to make use of a great existing resource, so if you know of one, it doesn't matter what language it's written in.)

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Is window.location.href = 'some_page.html' followed by search engines?

- by Arkaaito

Currently our website uses links to allow the user to change their locale. The problem with this is that you get a lot of random outlinks from each page on the site to... the same page, in other languages. When a search engine traverses this, it gets an excessively complex view of the site. We were going to change it to a form post to avoid this. However, it seems to me that we should just be able to change it to an onclick="window.location.href='change_my_language.php'" rather than an href="change_my_language.php". Am I right? Or do the major search engines scan for and follow this sort of thing nowadays?

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SimpleTest assertTags - loose matching? (for CakePHP)

- by Arkaaito

I'd like to use SimpleTest to set up some functionality tests for our project - in particular, we have a very busy page which has some random components and some static components, and I'd like to be able to write a simple test which only confirms the static bits (preferably only the one or two most important ones). In other words, I want to be able to leave out any tags on the page I don't care about, and write something like: $result = "<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"><head><title>...</title><meta .../></head><body><script type="text/javascript">...</script><div class="center-splash"><span>Welcome JohnDoe</span><p>Your progress:</p>...</div><div class="left-column">...</div><div class="right-column">...</div>...</body></html>"; $expects = array('html'=>true,'body'=>true,'div'=>array('class'=>'center_splash'),'span'=>true,'Welcome JohnDoe','/span','/div','/body','/html'); $this->assertTagsButIgnoreExtras($result, $expects); When I try this with assertTags it fails. Is there a version of assertTags which allows this - something either officially part of the SimpleTest or CakePHP project or unofficially put out under the MIT license or similar?

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