Business, Software Development and People

Hello and Welcome!

This site is a collection of my thoughts on a matter of things as well as a reference point for me on things that I know I will need to know later.

There's more to read about me and my motivation on the about page.

For managers: Reporting a technical issue

Filed under business

As an end user, it's often tempting to quickly send an email to technical support saying something like: "I tried to enter my credit card details but then it broke."

Think of a manager who prepares a business case: they often draw on many organisational departments, for instance finance, legal, techncial, sales and marketing. To make the final presentation, all these departments have their own input into the result.

Likewise, a simple page can draw on resources from many parts of a very complex system to show what appears to be a few elements on a page.

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On the subject of migrating information

Filed under technology

Hindsight is a lovely thing. Especially when watching information being migrated from one large, legacy system to another large, contemporary system.  Last month we discussed the information management gap, required reading as a definition for this post.

For point of reference, the existing system (or system that is being migrated from) will be called the legacy system and the system that is being migrated to is the contemporary system.

Below are some points to help as a checklist when dealing with migrating information.

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The Information Management Gap

Filed under technology

For many developers working with open source, information management is a fleeting thought that does not get its due time in the limelight. In fact, up until recently, there were no open source information management systems at all. So where does this leave the savvy business developer?

Read on to find out...

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The CiviCRM Difference

Filed under technology

Todays CRM market is saturated with products that purport to assist in easing the relationship management challenge.

The main products powering the enterprise focus on the ability of the organisation's people to generate leads, follow them up and complete a particular set of goals. This is great for an organisation whose primary focus is the development of wealth and profitability.

Where does CiviCRM fit in and what is it good at?

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Drupal 7 custom template only displaying the first character

Filed under technology

Drupal has slightly changed its Theme API calls between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. This small change can cause you (as it has me) some hours of grief at an apparently innocuous and undocumented feature.

The Drupal 6 Way

The old, Drupal 6 way of declaring a themable function was to do the following:

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Personal Competitive Advantage

Filed under personal development

Have you ever asked yourself, "What about me is my competitive advantage?"

Take a second to have a think about what that means to you.

being competitive

Competition is a bad word - to different people it means a lot of things that turns out to be worlds apart. For our use, competition will refer to the display of characteristics that set one apart from the others. For example, competition on price means that entities are displaying their price as what sets them apart, introducing the idea that their lower prices mean that they are better.

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Rules of Indenting

Filed under technology

The rules of PHP indenting are elegantly described by my coworker. These examples have been found in some code that we have refactored.

Thanks to Ben Evans for that gorgeous tidbit!

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A Note to all PHP Developers

Filed under technology

Developing in PHP is fun; it's cheap; it's easy. All it takes is a LAMP or equivalent stack, whether from a free host or on your own local machine.

During my days in looking over people's code, I've found some interesting approaches. These approaches favour form over function – i.e., the code plain does not work.

Note, the below code samples are from actual production applications that I have worked with over the years.

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Creating Business Value

Filed under personal development

A few days ago I read a powerful book that has become a motivating factor in my life.

The book is curiously titled "The Go Giver - A little story about a powerful business idea" with little else to take from the cover.

The book was suggested to me by an old friend of mine who is a university business lecturer. We decided on an impromptu catch up when I was visiting a relative at the university.

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David Calculli Speaks at the Australian Open Source Developers Conference

Filed under personal development

This past November, I attended the Australian Open Source Developers Conference. This conference is an annual event that brings together open source developers, business owners, industry leaders and companies to promote the use of open source tools in Australia.

During the conference, I spoke on two issues: developing in Drupal for small to medium business clients and making great mobile applications.

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