Recent posts

• Have You Heard The Wondrous Message?

  October 14, 2023 - 1 minute read

  One of my favorite hymns in Spanish is “¿Has oído el mensaje?”. The following is my attempt to create a more polished English translation, with rhyme and rhythm matching the Spanish melody.

  #Hymn #Translation

• Why @@ is the best attribute syntax for PHP

  August 21, 2020 - 5 minute read

  The Attributes v2 RFC (accepted on May 4, 2020) added support for native attributes in PHP 8 using the <<Attr>> syntax borrowed from Hacklang. In June, I authored the Shorter Attribute Syntax RFC to propose using @@Attr or #[Attr] to address five shortcomings of the original syntax.

  #PHP

• PolyCast: a library for safe type conversion in PHP

  October 25, 2015 - 3 minute read

  PHP now supports scalar type declarations, but how can user input be safely converted to the correct type?

  #PHP #Type safety

• High performance linked list sorting in JavaScript

  May 20, 2015 - 3 minute read

  This post describes an approach to efficiently sort linked lists from SQL in client-side code. While the below examples are written in JavaScript, you could use the same basic technique in almost any modern language.

  #JavaScript #Linked lists #Sorting

• Implementing a linked list in SQL

  May 17, 2015 - 3 minute read

  Recently I was challenged with enabling users to drag and drop items in a list to sort them in any order, and persisting that order in a SQL database.

  #Linked lists #PHP #SQL

• Interstellar starships: feasible or fiction?

  December 15, 2013 - 6 minute read

  Despite the significant scientific progress that has been made, energy requirements, high costs, and the problem of time still present enormous challenges to the vision of interstellar travel as portrayed in Star Trek and other films.

  #Interstellar travel #Warp drives

• Google, ethics, and Internet censorship

  July 10, 2013 - 6 minute read

  What if the websites and other content we want to access online had to first pass through a filter which determines whether or not the content is favorable to the government, and blocks it if it is deemed critical? Sadly, this scenario is currently a part of life in China.

  #Censorship #China #Ethics #Google

• Psychology in Interactive Web Design

  March 25, 2013 - 7 minute read

  You may be surprised to discover that there are actually psychological reasons for what makes an interface good or bad, intuitive or difficult to use. This post will explore three areas of good interface design: proprioception, Gestalt psychology, and performance.

  #Gestalt principles #Performance #Proprioception #Psychology

• Responsive Captcha: A small PHP library for preventing spam

  December 30, 2012 - 1 minute read

  Responsive Captcha is a PHP library which generates simple, random arithmetic and logic questions.

  #PHP