What have I been up to lately aside from being sick with flu the last 2-3 weeks? Re-arranging priorities by taking a good look at my portfolio to see what’s in it, where I think I should sink some time and money and what to park for now. I have two good concepts that I need to develop so that I can just add water and watch them grow.

Frustrated Programmer? Some Advice.

A word of advice: if you find yourself pulling out your hair every time you need to add a “simple feature” to one of your projects, educate yourself on how to better architect your code because this is a clear indication of a poorly designed application. Read up on design patterns, frameworks, object-oriented programming, and really anything you can about application design and concepts.

Over the last two years I have taken the steps to educate myself on more advanced PHP programming concepts. I guarantee it will frustrate the hell out of you changing from the paradigm of procedural to object-oriented programming but it is time well invested that will save you time and headaches in the future.

I have felt lucky through my career being exposed to what I have so I can know of and see “the bigger picture” and how and why I need to keep the bigger picture in mind when designing applications and all the intricacies within it. With my experience and putting these advanced PHP programming techniques to work, tackling larger web applications has become less challenging. Taking your code to the next level is just one more step to making life easier as a PHP web developer.

PHP-based Shopping Cart – Level Up

One outstanding item on my to-do list has been to finish rewriting my PHP-based shopping cart so that it’s using classes allowing easier integration of new features. I had already started on the re-write but got distracted while having “programmers block” in trying to design the architecture. I have ironed out a few kinks in the design while seeing how and where I can tie essentially three projects together into a network of sites feeding data to each other while adding more value to the users. Although the scope of the project is getting bigger, it’s going to make my life easier down the road when I want to add the features that won’t be available for the next phase of this project to be completed. I should also mention that the shopping cart is just one element in this whole project that won’t get launched until the final phase.

Network of Food/Health-related websites

Another network of websites I’m trying to get together is related to health, food, and cooking. This is another network of websites that will benefit greatly from being coded using OOP. The main concept behind this has been one I’ve had for a while now but from registering some more domains, I’m seeing how I can turn them also into a network of websites that feed off of each other.

The holdup has been more in “should I code this or use a pre-made script”? Of course the programmer in me wants to write everything from the ground up but the entrepreneur in me feels time would be better spent promoting the website and producing content rather then writing a web application that never gets finished. I think I’ve come to a combination of the two that will get me to the level of “add water, watch grow” phase of the project.

The “Bigger Projects” in a Nutshell

These two major projects are where I’ll be focusing most of my energy the next 4-6 months. I will be pouring little to no effort into the codebase of the other websites but hope to work on content creation and promotion. The scripts running those sites need to be polished off a bit to the point that I feel they are complete.

One thing I have been striving for the last two years is a solid codebase that I’d feel comfortable promoting for sale to others. I want to build my business with steel and concrete and it’s currently build on sand, mud, with a some steel present and concrete mixing in the mixer. I am headed in the right direction.