Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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On Agile, Shipping, & Scope Creep

I think Waterfall has a tendency to be propped up as this mythical approach of the past that no sane person would follow anymore, when the truth is that plenty of so-called Agile shops fall into the same trap that we fall in all the time, which is to bundle too much shit together in such a way that it can’t be shipped as independent pieces. The result being long, annoying development processes where it doesn’t take one to two weeks to ship something. It takes a month or more or what have you.

The answer is neither one or the other. It’s sort of a constant struggle between the two. There’s not a hard delineation either between what is Waterfall and what is Agile. They’ve sort of become these, in some ways, cartoon incarnations of themselves. The truth is it’s a lot more gray.

(via Signal versus Noise)

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Handling Currency in Rails

I’m working on a small application in which currency – specifically USD – will be stored in a MySQL database.

Because Rails supports a variety of number formats, it’s not completely obvious which is the best to use when storing monetary values.

Using a decimal with a certain level of precision seems to be the most scalable option.

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