Posts

Women In Tech: It's Only An Issue Because People Are Making It One

There is a serious problem in the tech world and no, it’s not gender equality. The news, feminists and anyone else involved in the debate all like to argue that the tech world is run by misogynous men who have 1950’s views on women in the workplace. The tired argument of women finding it hard to get a tech job is also flaunted. None of this is true. You know why there aren’t as many women in tech (especially programming)? Because well, there just aren’t as many women interested as there are men. It has nothing to do whether you have man parts or women parts, it’s just a matter of difference. You could argue that there aren’t enough male nurses and while there are some, most men are just not interested in being nurses.

When Third World Foods Become First World Super Foods

Quinoa is a staple of South American inhabitants (poor and non-poor alike), a grain the people have been consuming way before it was cool with hipsters and health freaks to consume it in North America and then subsequently any Westernised continent. The rise in popularity and demand for this precious grain-like food has created a few problems. One of the major problems is the supply struggling to keep up with demand. This once readily available staple is now a commodity, those who have been relying on it for years to feed their families and live are being robbed.

Does WordPress Need A, "Light" Version?

It’s hard to argue WordPress has been the dominant blogging platform since forever and while it’s still widely used for blogging, it’s used more-so as a content management system if anything else. This site uses WordPress, but to be quite honest, doesn’t take advantage of any of its CMS features like post types and whatnot. The Growing Micro/Static Blog Movement There has been a growing trend in the blogging space (mostly developers for the moment) using Markdown based blogging platforms that use actual files and parse them into HTML instead of needing a database or any complicated features like plugins.

Kohana Theme Module: Theming Functionality For Your Kohana Projects

Kohana has become somewhat of a new-found obsession for me, I am releasing yet another Kohana module contribution in the form of a theming module that allows you to add theme functionality to your Kohana projects. First and foremost, in its current state, this module is merely a fancy wrapper around Kohana modules that allows you to have a custom set of theme directories. Behind the scenes the active theme is loaded as a module into Kohana and worked with like it can be any other way. This module is for Kohana 3.3.

Kohana Module: Serial Key Library

Here is another Kohana 3.3 contribution in the form of a serial key library. Essentially it does what it says on the tin: it generates serial keys. You can generate serial keys using a bunch of different formats and it’s pretty minimal in terms of configuration/functionality. Check out the Kohana serial key library on Github here and feel free to make contributions and report issues.

Kohana Plugins System

You may recall a year or so ago I wrote a library for Codeigniter that allowed you to build applications with a plugin system similar to that of WordPress. After recently switching to Kohana, I’ve ported over my plugin system to Kohana and made some improvements. This is my first Kohana contribution, I have yet to decide what my next contribution will be, but there will be lots more coming.

Working With Kohana's ORM

Working with Kohana’s ORM isn’t really something you can find definitive information and usage examples on, which is a shame, because Kohana has a surprisingly decent in-built ORM you can use in your projects. In this tutorial, I will touch on enabling the ORM module, creating a model that works with the ORM and performing a bunch of different queries. This article will assume you are using Kohana 3.3 and will be updated for future versions if anything changes.

Hello Kohana, Goodbye Codeigniter

Well it’s been a few days since moving from Codeigniter and while there are some noticeable differences, I’ve grown to really love Kohana. The inclusion of ORM, an auth library, support for HMVC and how the framework is pieced together just feels notches above what Codeigniter was able to achieve. I did try and use Kohana a couple of years back, but my love for Codeigniter was so great, I couldn’t justify the time to truly learn Kohana properly nor appreciate it’s power.

So... Ellislab Is Looking For A New Owner For Codeigniter

Recently I asked Ellislab some questions, not too long ago about the future of Codeigniter. The answers I was given essentially led on Ellislab had a vision and plan for Codeigniter with no talk of giving the brand to someone else because they no longer want to maintain it. But recently Ellislab announced they’re looking for a new Codeigniter owner and can no longer maintain the framework, contradicting some of the responses that I received.

A Super Simple Whitespace Fix For Inline-block

There is no denying that display:inline-block is arguably one of the most underused lines of CSS, ever. People mostly use floats and while floating has its advantages and use, inline-block is different. The one issue with display: inline-block is the annoying whitespace issue. It’s 2013 and this is still an issue (it has been since around 2009 when inline-block gained better browser support), but fortunately there is a simple fix that fixes the issue from IE8 onwards and all modern browsers.