Phil Sturgeon

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HTTP Status Codes Are Not Enough

I spotted an article called Just learn Rails (Part 3) HTTP status codes. It started off good, and I liked that it was teaching people to avoid hardcoding their HTTP status codes in code, using :conflict instead of 409 and the like. That is a good message to send, which

Auto-Incrementing IDs: Giving API Data Away

Something we're always taught as developers, usually by tutorials or via the defaults in various ORM tools, is every SQL table needs an auto-incrementing ID. This is a weirdly common fallacy, enforced by old tutorials, new tutorials and half-arsed tooling in various forms. Why are auto-incrementing IDs a

The Ratio of Women Speakers in Tech

There are a lot of my opinions and viewpoints that have changed over time. Some slowly and naturally, and some sharp and sudden like a wet mackerel to the face. One is on the ratio of women speakers when it comes to tech conferences. I previously held an opinion like

Geeks Giving for Aids: 2015

Back in 2013 I did a three-day ride from Boston to New York, along with hundreds of amazing people. Everyone was in various levels of fitness and with various levels of interest in cycling, all who had come together with the aim of helping raise a shitload of money to

Awkward Mistakes with Google Maps API

Awkward Mistakes with Google Maps API

Working on carpooling startup Ride.com we got to do some awesome stuff with them. As far as my job has been concerned, the first 4-5 months were entirely green field development. As a team we built multiple services to compliment a central API, and with the help of some

The Importance of Serializing API Output

The Importance of Serializing API Output

I've given the API Pain Points talk a bazillion times over the last year. In just 2015 I gave it at: * Lone Star PHP * OpenWest * ConFoo One section that seems to get a lot of feedback and questions is when I talk about serialization, which I refer to

PHP 7 Feature Freeze

Today was the feature freeze for PHP 7. That means no new votes can be started for a feature that is aimed at PHP 7.0, and would instead have to go into PHP 7.1. Instead of heading out to St Patrick's Day with a bunch of