A week of Memphis #2 (28 April 2008 -> 4 May 2008)

Done:

• Refactor the code and delete image preview feature


• Study for exams


• Synchronize my calendar and todo list between google calendar and Rainlendar


• Make some hotfixes in the server


• Start reading the book: The Art of Agile Development

Am I not skillful enough?

This is a post expressing my thought and criticism on myself.

After attending the arctic startup event in Helsinki, I have seen lots of cool company and noticed what is their development stage, what is the development method and how talented they are ... I also realized that our team is at the very beginning stage and indeed we are not cool. And if we can not survive or evolve, we are doomed.

A serious start-up company will not take normal people, in fact the company decreases the failure risk percentage by hiring (extremely) talented people. However, I am more or less a normal person, I did go to school every day, did play games every week, and programmed as a hobby... Sometimes, I ask myself how serious I am in this project, and what is the situation I am facing now if I continue living like I did before. Will I fail ?

I am facing a chance, yes it is a chance to completely change my life. Never before have I realized that I almost catch up with the web 2.0 trends, and if I do not do anything, I am losing it. Never before have I realized that this is the only chance to be popular and rich and to let my beloved mom know that she can be proud of her son. Yes, by the time I left that bar, I realized it well and suddenly I knew that my team was far behind race, we are somehow losing the battle because of the development process is too slow.

A friend made a joke that he definitely will not work for a start-up company like us because of the risk. However, I did take it seriously, I know that we are bearing the risk but in order to minimize it, we should change the way we work. In my point of view, if we do not change then we will certainly fail. Don't be too optimistic.

I spent so much time on trivial thing, I should stop surfing non-sense or unrelated websites. I should focus on coding and do not afraid of refactoring or modifying to improve code quality, do not afraid of applying new features.

I should narrow down what I should learn, and hire other persons to handle with their profession instead of trying to do it myself. I admit that I can not handle a real production server and my knowledge on Linux is limited . I admit that I am not a web designer. In the future I only want to be a pure web developer. And that will be my only focus.

PS: Like scred team, I will try to work 12 hours a day.

Almost every application is now available on the web, how about mobile phone?

I write this post with a Nokia 9300i and its default browser. Basically I just fired up the browser with the link m.wordpress.com but I was disappointed because of the limitation given by wordpress. All I got is a text input and text area for the post's subject and content, i cant even write an url or insert my images. Then I googled for a blogging client and found a tool from telewaving but it s not available for my phone. Hope someone will write a similar tool in Java.

Silently a new flash reader has come

This evening I went to mahshelf.com to read my favorite books and immediately I was surprised by the new fancy flash reader. It looks neat and some features have been added to make it more convenient for the users, i think. I really like the new one and perhaps the quality of images has been improved too, or something happens to my eyes :p

Meanwhile, I am speding time developing some new features and reading more books. I just can't help reading books, I am so addicted. Hope I one day will come up with the best and most optimized algorithm to serve PDF file in the system.

A week of Memphis #1 (13->20 April 2008)

Yeah, this type of blogging is copied from other blog but I think it's cool to remind what I have done or at least my friends can keep up to my work. Make a comment if anything went wrong here :P . Ok, in the previous week, I did:

1. Deploy a new production server.


2. Write a php script to clean redundant files on that server.


3. Solve DNS problem with the domain.


4. Install memcache on my test server.


5. Convert real link from text in the book description, for example: mahshelf.com now becomes http://mahshelf.com.


6. Change page title dynamically to improve page SEO.


7. Make a presentation about Web 2.0 user interface at EVTEK school and receive lots of criticisms about that :( .


8. Think about my mom, forex rates showed 1 Euro = 26,058.5 Vietnamese Dong yesterday, my currency lost its value for the last 5 years. Being a Vietnamese is tough.
   

Moreover, I also write a quick note here as a to-do list, if you find sth missing, inform me through the comment.

• Make a good benchmark on how memcache can really save the day.


• Although the link is automatically linked, it still breaks the layout if the URL is too long, need to truncate the URL (not easy with those php preg_replace functions :( )


• Need to add dynamic meta keywords to improve page SEO as well.


• Improve URL routing system.


• Fix current CSS tooltip, an alternative is using an AJAXed one to save bandwidth.

Some tips to improve the performance of a web app

Before writing anything about this, I would like to apologize Odin Chen because I did not fulfill my exaggeration that I will make my web app run 500 times faster than before. After the most recent benchmark, it probably runs only 10 times faster :P

Here is the list I have applied to my app, hope it helps someone

• Compress web files such as javascript and css files, that saves both web traffic and loading time.


• Add an expires header to web files and images, it is only necessary when those files are not changed before they expire (I am still finding the best way to do it)


• Choose a small footprint server, I know Ubuntu 7.10 is great but you do not need the latest PHP 5.2.5, why dont you consider Debian?


• Compile your own package with your own configuration, or at least install only the essential packages from the repos, not all of them :P


• Use a caching engine such as APC, eAccelerator, Zend Optimizer, or memcached ...


• Use your skill in programming, yes by that I mean code efficiency : do not forget to join foreign table, that saves many time in database querying, and unset the variables or objects that used in actions file that are no longer needed in template file

In the future, if I read or think of some other tips I will blog about it, if you have any advice, do not hesitate do leave a comment here. :D

Web users, please save web designers by upgrading to the latest IE7 or Firefox

When I was a normal web surfer, I never thought it would be a critical issue for web page to display correctly on every browser. But recently it comes to me as a head-ache matter when designing the layout of mahshelf.com. Luckily there is a javascript file that makes IE5-6 behave like a standard compliant browser. Although the situation about web design is temporarily stable, I am still looking a talented web designer in the future.

PS: I made a quick look at browser statistics table and in this month, IE5-6 browser users are continuously decreasing.