Author Archives: Robert

I recently spearheaded a campaign at my workplace to move from a problematic system of building releases using patching and SVN to the more modern, widely accepted Git approach. Things are moving along pretty well, and everyone is starting to … Continue reading »

At my job, I’m currently spearheading a move from an SVN patching model to a Git branching model. This should make it easier to do things like manage releases and streamline development. But we have a lot of finished work … Continue reading »

MAMP is a popular platform for web development on a Mac. As you’re doing web development, working on a Mac generally also results in needing either a Windows machine or a VMWare instance of Windows on your Mac. In my … Continue reading »

Variable variables are a nice, flexible tool for when you’re transforming data types (say, arrays to classes). At the very worst case, they’re good for using some kind of string data that has come down the pipe to serve as … Continue reading »

I took a few minutes today to change up the way the site looks. I thought the original design felt a little heavy. It didn’t seem to be the palette, but rather how it was employed. The fonts were a … Continue reading »

Quality assurance is a pain for everybody. There are countless ways a bug can avail itself, and sometimes they’re not easy to find. There are a couple of reasons why it’s generally a good idea to let someone with a … Continue reading »

Hey everybody! I just got back from a ten-day vacation in Spain. I can finally tell you all that I’m moving to the Bay Area in the next couple of weeks to take up a position as PHP Software Architect … Continue reading »

That’s right, I am officially a Certified MySQL Associate. Of course, I can’t disclose anything about the test now that I’ve taken it.  I will say that the certification book’s study material is pretty ample; so long as you’re working … Continue reading »

I take my Sun Certified MySQL Associate certification exam tomorrow. I work with MySQL most days, and I wonder if I actually should have started with the DEV-I exam instead. Either way, it’s good practice for the harder, more expensive … Continue reading »

Welcome to the new blog feature on RobertElwell.info, which is my personal homepage moved from the UT Computational Linguistics group’s web hosting to its own domain and host. The main site has had a bit of a redesign, but you … Continue reading »