Domoire Darrell De Freitas

From Zero to Daily Reliance — Launching a platform

Back in 2020 a friend pinged me with questions about building apps:

Where do I find developers to build an app?

What's a good price for asking someone to build an app?

Do you have any recommendations for individual developers or shops?

I had heard these questions before. He'd been asking a variations of the same questions for about 2 or 3 years. Each time I tried to send him to some online portal, ... more

The Cult of Done Manifesto

I've suffered from having an endless stream of unfinished and abandoned projects. Then I came across The Cult of Done Manifesto. I've read many manifesto's, but this one really rang true to home. I'm going to be adopting it in my regular life.

Below is the original post by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark

Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are ... more

   ---

GoLang time format

In most languages I've run into so far you do something close to an equivalent of `date.format("Y-M-d hh:mm:ss Z")

It works that way for PHP, Javascript, Python.

Instead, with Go you do date.Format("2006/01/02 03:04:05 PM MST"), which I thought initially meant I could seed a time format with an example of any date I wanted. Upon changing the date to something meaningful to myself I quickly found my timestamps all printing out my custom date format.

It turns out that "2006/01/02 03:04:05 PM MST" has special meaning.

It references the data from the POSIX date command which gives the form:

signal

I don't code for fun anymore. Haven't done it in a while. It's become a series of things TODO at work.

I want to write shit for fun again

Unraveling it all

It used to be in the good old days when programming for the web that you could just include a JS file and call it a day. The included file probably had all of the instructions you needed to understand what was going on.Probably.

It wasn't great, but it was easy to unravel what was going on. If you had a bug somewhere you could track it down fairly easily. Just look at where the error was coming from and track down the offending line of code that wasn't allowing snow to fall all across your page (or whatever other ... more

HTML: ID vs Classes

Recently I've been helping teach intro HTML and programming classes through the Philly GDI chapter. One of the big things that seems to stump beginners for a while is the difference between whether to use a ID tag or a class. When learning they seem to both do the same thing, however there are some key difference between them.

To start off a HTML class or ID can both be thought of as hooks that allow you to select an HTML element and do something with it. Formally these hooks are called selectors.You can use selectors in CSS to style ... more

Advanced JS

I've been working on getting a better understanding of JavaScript for the last year or so. For a while now I've been doing mostly front end development to provide a nice user experience. This isn't to say I've been doing UX stuff, but connecting a series of JQuery statements to make something work.

Thinking I'd hit bottom on how much I could learn about JS on the job I was happy to find John Resig's Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.

This is exactly the book I need for a series of technologies. Not the introductory book on the topic with ... more

Interviewing with limited experience

Internships and co-ops are great ways to learn and to help you pad your resume a little bit before you start looking for jobs after graduation. When I was a in college I wanted to do an internship desperately so that I would be in a better position once I hit the job market. It worked out pretty well for me as my internship lead to a part time job which lead to a full time job the day after I graduated.

Now I'm on the other side of the table and I've gone through a couple of cycles of ... more

DEBUGING TIPS

Guide of things common basic debugging traps that I've fallen into over the years and I've seen others fall into. On any given day these questions run through my mind as I encounter strange behavior or when something isn't working right. They may seem obvious but I wanted to get them down and onto paper so I can have something to reference when it's 4AM and the deadline is at 8AM. Also this should hopefully be helpful to newcomers

An updated copy of this is kept on github ###General

Don't panic! What do you expect to happen? What is actually ... more

HOW TO BUILD PHP AND APACHE FROM SOURCE

All the cool new features for PHP are in the latest releases. You can't get to those easily from package managers. It takes package managers a while to update to the latest versions. If you want to get the latest version faster you'll need to build your own copy to get the latest and greatest and to help the open source community debug.

Here are some notes on how to get this done. (The instructions below assume basic linux terminal competency)

Installing Apache from source

Pre-requisites: Make : apt-get install make

APR: apt-get install libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev. Apr is needed for ... more

MYSQL PARAMETERIZED QUERIES

Most applications use a database of some form. For PHP MySQL is a popular choice of database for a variety of reasons:

It's free It usually comes bundled with a PHP installation (shared hosting, WAMP, LAMP etc.) There are a variety of tutorials for it on the web and it's easy to learn The final point has much to do with why many people who programme in PHP get bogged down with security issues. The first 5 tutorials that I found all showed users how to perform MySQL queries using the myql_* library.

Notice how on the documentation for this ... more

AN OLD FRIEND

I've been feeling guilty lately about my Raspberry-pi sitting on my desk collecting dust, every time I use my PC I can feel it staring silently at me, judging me.

To fix this I decided to get a 32GB SD card so I could have more space to play around on it (2GB is not enough) and got a HDMI to VGA converter so I could give it a monitor of it's own. No need to give up one of my screens to use it, or have to crane my neck at an awkward angle to use it on my ... more

QUCK GIT COMMAND LINE ACCESS VIA XCODE

I've recently started using Xcode again and was attempting to use git via the command line since I'm more at home there. After some Googling I found out that it was tied into Xcode .app folder. I looked for a way to make it easy to get at the already built in git. I hated the idea of installing another version and bloating my system with multiple versions when there is a perfectly suitable version already installed. Here is the easiest way I found to work around this:

Open the terminal Type in sudo vi .profile Edit the file to ... more

THE GOOGLE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD

We've all Googled something in our lifetime (except for that one guy I heard ask "What's a Google?") and having worked in front end user IT support for years I can tell you that most of the time the God like skills users have commended me for were just a mixture of dropping the error message or description of the problem into Google and learning how to filter out the vast and ever increasing amounts of noise on the internet.

I can remember how I found just about every other search engine out there: Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and AOL ... more

PROJECT TIME

I have ADD when it comes to my hobbies.

There are endless choices out there when it comes to personal projects with each being more interesting that the last one. The tech industry is moving faster than I've ever seen it move with a constant stream of innovation from the big players in the market and indie devs just putting out great tools and products. Right now I'd love to just pour hours into Programmable Drones, Arduino and other electronic devices, Android Development, Windows 8 app development, Diving deeper into what I already know, doing neat things in HTML5 or ... more

AAAAND BACK!

Server issues now resolved. Back up and running but lost all data. In light of this I'm thinking of moving to Amazon web services, I've been looking for an excuse to play around with their services for a while now and this gives me a chance.