I wanted to play with the buffering capabilities of PHP and tested it on my site http://www.careercurry.com.

I wanted to use it to improve the site performance and download times for my site and hence implemented GZIP compression on the home page and my article pages.

To improve your site performance implement the following steps on your pages. I recommend creating a copy of a page that you want to test and implement changes on the copy before you implement it on the actual page. Also try these changes on one page before you go live on the entire site.

Are college dropouts more successful than people with good education? It would seem so if you consider that many billionaires are people who dumped college. However, what this hides is the fact that although millions quit studies before completing them, very few of them go on to become rich. What the list of the super-rich dropouts signifies is that in business, a top degree is not as important as having the right aptitude, attitude, determination and vision.

You might be the best programmer with an unbeatable logic, but there are some skills that you must obtain before it is too late.

As your age picks up, it is a bit difficult to catch up with so many technical advancements and languages that you can do when you are young. But as your grow up, your preferences would change and so would your likes towards programming and development. You slowly will look at managing than developing. You would aim to become a Project Manager or a Delivery Manager or a Vice President of a corporation. At this level programming skills become less relevant and other managerial skills become more important.

Once you reach that level, it is necessary to have some managerial skills to prove yourself in the area of management as well. Following are the skills that I feel that every programmer should aim at to grow up the corporate ladder.

The answer is very simple… added cash!!! But that was not the reason that I was referring to.

Though earning cash is important and I don’t discount that fact. In addition to earning cash, a developer should free lance because freelancing provides you with many challenges that your job would not.

1. More exposure
In a job you would be assigned to a project and be responsible to do a small portion of the project called module. This way you would only know how to implement that small portion. To gain good experience it is important to understand and implement a complete full scale project. With a freelancing job, you get to know requirements of the world and automatically learn to implement projects.

I have lately been researching on implementing dotProject for my organization. My evaluation shows that dotProject is a good Project Management tool for consulting and can also help you implement Agile development methodologies. However, I don’t find it suitable for an Internet Company with a release cycle of 2 – 3 days from development to QA to Live (this is because at various stages tasks will have to be created – which as of now is not automated – you will manually have to create them).

The requirement from my company was to use Mantis and provide integration with dotProject. I googled around and found various links leading nowhere and finally got something substantial. However, I did a bit of playing around with the code to get it working perfectly well.

I write this article to share my experience that I had in fixing bugs on live site. With users live on your site and transactions worth 100s of dollars ready to be executed, you cannot risk down time to fix the bug and get live again. So what do you do? You definitely cannot keep that bug there; you cannot down the site; you cannot disable the feature that has the bug? What would you do?

In the last post I covered PHP variables and how to use them. In this tutorial we will understand how to use strings in PHP. If you are set to make a career in development then you would need to use a lot of strings to make your program / script work.

What is a String?

A string is nothing but a series of characters in a sequence. E.g: “Sunil”, “Programming”, “PHP”, “Tutorial” are all examples of Strings.

Creating a String in PHP

As discussed in PHP Tutorial 2 – Variables, PHP is a loosely typed language. Therefore you don’t have to declare a variable as String to use it (as in other programming languages like Java).

To declare a String you need to use double quotes (“) or single quotes (‘). Both these approaches have some differences that we will cover later. See the example below to understand how to create strings:

<?php
$string = “This is a string”;
$name = “Sunil Bhatia”;
$data = “My name is $name”;
echo $data;
?>

I write this post to help you understand what pointers are and how they are used.

I remember from my early college days when a ‘C’ pointer used to be a nightmare and I believe for many, it still is. I hope that this guide will help you understand Pointers in ‘C’ more clearly.

Before we begin our journey towards understanding what a pointer is and how to use it, lets understand how variables are stored in memory.

How variables are stored in memory?

Each byte of memory has a unique address. A variable’s address is the address of the first byte allocated to that variable. Suppose the following variables are declared in a program:

char alpha;
int number;
float amount;

In the earlier PHP tutorial we saw an introduction to what PHP is and how it is used in web programming. Click here to read that Post

In this tutorial on PHP Variables we will discuss the following:

• What is a variable?
• Variables in PHP
• PHP is a loosely typed language
• Variable naming rules in PHP
• Use of the double dollar ($$) variables

What is a variable?

A variable is the name given to a memory allocation to store or retrieve information. A variable can be used to store values like strings (text), numbers, array or objects. Once a variable is set it can be used anywhere in your script.

A lot of colleagues, friends and strangers (that I meet in meetups, etc) have asked me to explain how can they improve their programming logic.

Though programming is mainly associated with the field of Computer Science, but writing good and optimized code is mainly an art. Like all art forms requires tremendous patience and rigorous practice, building gray cells for programming logic is not much different.

I present this post/article to you on how you could too improve your programming logic.

Tip 1: Learn the language ‘C’

You might be an expert .NET, Java or PHP developer, but I would recommend that you MUST learn ‘C. We all know why ‘C’ is the most powerful programming language, but I am not recommending learning ‘C’ to you because of its power in programming.

‘C’ offers you a structured style of programming. You have one file with the main() method and the execution begins from there and the execution flow proceeds as you have directed it to.

The main advantage in ‘C’ is that it allows you to play around with memory directly. This I believe is very important if you need to understand how data is passed from one memory block to another. The reason is that you start to visualize in your minds eye how data moves in your program.

The next step is to develop programs that will help you improve your logic.