oDesk

I recently discovered odesk, an online marketplace website, and joined it. The thing I like the most about it currently is the test-taking feature.

You can take tests for knowledge within different areas of Web development, and once you are done, your profile lists that you’ve completed the test, what score you achieved, etc. They even give you badges to put on your website, and they link to the oDesk profile page:

oDesk Certified CSS 2.0 Designer
oDesk Certified SQL Database Administrator
oDesk Certified PHP5 Developer
oDesk Certified Advanced PHP Developer
oDesk Certified HTML 4.01 Designer
oDesk Certified jQuery Professional
oDesk Certified LAMP Developer
oDesk Certified YAML Professional
oDesk Certified XHTML 1.0 Designer
oDesk Certified TCP/IP Consultant
oDesk Certified DHTML Developer
oDesk Certified AJAX Developer
oDesk Certified WordPress Expert
oDesk Certified Twitter Programmer
oDesk Certified Drupal Web programmer

I can write, too:
oDesk Certified English Writer
oDesk Certified English Spelling (U.S. Version) Professional
oDesk Certified English (Sentence Structure) Expert
oDesk Certified Resume Writer

A writing writer! 😀 It’s meant to be Resume Writer.

Refactoring PHP

Here are some common opportunities for improving the maintainability of code through refactoring that I find when reading code.

  1. Replace Duplicated HTML with Iterating Over an Array

    The purpose of most PHP code is to output HTML that the web server will send back to the browser. If you have a table that has 20 rows, and all those rows have the same structure, but the data in each row is different, you could write it 2 ways:

    1. Duplicated HTML

           <tr>
             <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3">2010-05-04</td>
             <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3">Copenhagen</td>
             <td align="left" valign="top" class="messageFormTd3">City Hall</td>
             <td align="center" class="messageFormTd5">10:15</td>
           </tr>
           <tr>
             <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3">2010-05-02</td>
             <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3">Zagreb</td>
             <td align="left" valign="top" class="messageFormTd3">Main Square</td>
             <td align="center" class="messageFormTd5">12:30</td>
           </tr>
    2. Iterating Over an Array

                 <?php foreach (array(
                   array('date' => '2010-05-04', 'city' => 'Copenhagen', 'venue' => 'City Hall', 'time' => '10:15'),
                   array('date' => '2010-05-02', 'city' => 'Zagreb', 'venue' => 'Main Square', 'time' => '12:30'),
                 ) as $event) { ?>
                 <tr>
                   <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3"><?php echo $event['date'] ?></td>
                   <td align="center" valign="middle" class="messageFormTd3"><?php echo $event['city'] ?></td>
                   <td align="left" valign="top" class="messageFormTd3"><?php echo $event['venue'] ?></td>
                   <td align="center" class="messageFormTd5"><?php echo $event['time'] ?></td>
                 </tr>
                 <?php } ?>

Hello World – First Post

Hello world!

I am really excited to be writing my first blog post as part of setting up my online presence at bernardic.ca.

Since I work as a programmer, and have a Bachelors degree in Computer Scrience, I think it would be good to start with a hello world. Here it is in all the programming languages I use or have used. The constraint is of course that I don’t look it up on the Web or in other people’s source code, but rather either go by memory, or memory plus the help of a compiler/interpreter:

PHP

<?= 'Hello World!'?>

Ruby

puts 'Hello world!'

Python

print 'Hello world!n'

Java

public class Hello {
  public static void main(String[] args){
    System.out.println("Hello world!");
  }
}

LISP

(print "Hello, World!")

Perl

print "Hello World!n"

C

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
  printf("Hello World!n");
}

bash

echo 'Hello World!'

Javascript

alert("Hello World!");

or

window.onload = function () { document.write("Hello World!"); }

C#

using System;
public class Hello {
 public static void Main() {
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
 }
}

There it is. I also tried C++, but could not figure out the whole stdout << “Hello World!”, or however it would actually go. 🙂 Happy Coding!