Weekly roundup: Chansonnier is ready

This week I've completed the last user story (search term highlighting) on Chansonnier, my thesis-related project on multimedia search. Now I'm reviewing my thesis document with the goal of graduating in July and return to the PHP world.

Here are my original articles for this week.

DZone
Practical PHP Patterns: Single Table Inheritance
Lower your bar in Test-Driven Development
Practical PHP Patterns: Class Table Inheritance
The refactoring breakthrough on a CoffeeMachine, a post which gained little attention but that presents my approach to Test-Driven Development and refactoring on a little sample project from the ground up. If you wanna see how I work with TDD, this post also points to the related repository on github.

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Open source life style

Weekly roundup: getting to the end of my thesis

I almost finished the application which my thesis is a report on, and I'm getting to the end of writing it. I will probably publish it after graduation if I will be allowed to (not know what is the university policy), if only for the many testing insights for Java (OSGi) and web applications that I have inserted here.

Anyway, here are my original articles for this week.
Practical PHP Patterns: Embedded Value
Testing web applications with Selenium
Practical PHP Patterns: Serialized LOB
Client applications with Ajax Solr: JavaScript vs. servlets

Yet another weekly roundup

With my thesis due for July and five exams in this month, I've had very little time. Fortunately, I have four original articles for you every week at DZone.

Practical PHP Patterns: Association Table
Death by buzzwords: The design viewpoint expresses the logical components and their structural relationships... My head explodes.
Practical PHP Patterns: Dependent Mapping
Getting to know Solr, Lucene done right

Weekly roundup: new development box

After the death of my 512-megabytes-of-Sdram box, finally a replacement arrived that allows me to run Eclipse for Java development without issues (4 GB of DDR, dual core processor, motherboard from NASA).
Fortunately, Zend Framework 2 git repository has been created this week, so that I can still have some fun with vim and phpunit from the command line.

There are my original articles for the past week (all on DZone).
Practical PHP Patterns: Identity Field
OSGi and servlets can work together
Practical PHP Patterns: Foreign Key Mapping
CSS3 pseudo-classes

Weekly roundup: giving back to Zend Framework

I've proposed myself for becoming the Zend_Debug maintainer for the 2.x iteration of Zend Framework. Actually it is composed by a single class, but since I don't know how much time I will have available in the next months I feel I can start from here, and alleviate a bit the workload of the most busy maintainers.
If you want to help too, join the zf-contributor mailing list.

Here are my articles for this week.
Practical PHP Patterns: Identity Map
Writing user stories for web applications
Practical PHP Patterns: Lazy Loading
Yahoo! Query Language

What to do on weekends

At least, what I do on weekends in relation to software development, university and all my work-related projects and tasks. Feel free to add comments about your lifestyle and what you think of work-life balance: I think I finally found an equilibrium after all these years, without feeling guilty in my free time.

What I do on the weekend (when I have time)
When I have time because weekend is meant for resting, going out, drinking, partying... Still, you sometimes find yourself waking up at 10 AM on Sunday morning or find a free hour before going to a football game. How will this hour be spent?
I usually read books, monstly non-fiction, and articles from feed aggregator that built up until Saturday or Sunday.
I experiment sometimes, or start writing drafts for new articles. And I plan the goals and the required work for the upcoming week.

What I don't do in the weekend
I don't write code in the weekend: I know that even when I feel inspired writing code on Sunday, it would drain my energies for the subsequent week. There is a famous icon of the open source programmer that writes code in his free time, but free time shouldn't be oppressed by a todo list by definition. I schedule my contributions in the workweek, when I can establish a rhythm in my work and process also non-exciting programming tasks.
I never publish original content (something other than a link roundup) for the same reason. Brainstorming or writing a rough draft is simple when you have the inspiration and you want to capture some thoughts, but actually publishing it implies a polishing process (proofreading, formatting, editing...) that is boring to do when you're supposed to rest the mind.
A nice addition to this list now that I have embraced the Pomodoro technique: I never timebox on the weekend. This exclusion of free time from pomodoros is explicitly stated by the inventor of the technique.

As a sidenote, I never check email on purpose after a predetermined hour even in the workdays,or at least try to: now that I'm expecting feedback from eBay sellers I infringe the rule, unfortunately.
Since you wouldn't want to craft an answer to some complex question or start a new project following a late evening email, just don't check the inbox: reading such emails now will only result in worrying over the night. Having a different e-mail for work and life will be useful...

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Weekly roundup: computer died

My home primary computer died yesterday after a week of freezes. The disks seem fine, so there's no data loss. Anyway, I'll continue to write from the netbook.

Here are the posts of this week published elsewhere on the web.

DZone
Practical PHP Patterns: Data Mapper
Asynchronous processing in PHP
Practical PHP Patterns: Unit of Work
Zend_Test for Acceptance TDD

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