Mark’s Site

As you grow into programming, you can pick up some poor habits along the way. These habits produce the same output, but when used in large projects could end up causing some performance headaches in the long run, causing you to get mentally spanked for not paying attention when reading this article!
So to save your [...]

I’m in the process of creating a csv import application for employee data among other things, so I needed good quality test data. Instead of writing a few lines of test data myself, I thought I’d check if any free applications existed to do the work for me. I’m into free applications that I don’t [...]

Some call it coding preparation, others will call it planning and design, but we’re talking about the same thing. The more I code, the more I see professional programmers who just want to code. They don’t care if the design is complete. After all, they have enough info to get started right? They have the [...]

This is important, listen up! The singleton design pattern is used to ensure a class has only one instance, and that global access to that instance is available. In other words, it restricts instantiation of a class to one object.

What are design patterns and why do I want to know about them?

A useful example that I thought I should share

Stuff you need to know about downgrading

When I first started web development, one thing I was always torn on was how to design my screens. I had loads of information that I needed to display in some meaningful, easy to search format. After many years of trial and error, I’ve now got my ‘template’ screens that I use for all my content management screens.

It can be confusing when you start developing in a new language to know about the rules for commenting.

It’s so important to have a separate staging environment, so you can make changes (major or minor) and test the results BEFORE releasing to your live server.