Category Archives: Programming

Scrum: How we do Sprint Retrospectives

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Silvan Mühlemann

Four weeks have passed since the last sprint planning meeting. Sprint number two has come to an end. It’s time for the sprint retrospective. The motivation for the sprint retrospective is: Visualize the accomplishment – important for the team morale … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged | 4 Comments

Implementing scrum at tilllate.com

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Silvan Mühlemann

The first sprint is done! Yes we finally started doing Scrum at tilllate.com*. Well, it’s not exactly how Schwaber and Sutherland would expect it. But our way fits our team. And the acceptance in both the IT team and the … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged | 5 Comments

Unit testing makes coding more fun

Posted on June 1, 2008 by Silvan Mühlemann

“unit testing is a test that validates that individual units of source code are working properly”, that’s what Wikipedia says about unit testing. That’s general knowledge. But what motivates me even more than the increased software quality is that it … Continue reading →

Posted in PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Unit test practice at tilllate.com

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Silvan Mühlemann

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I’d like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests. In our … Continue reading →

Posted in PHP, Programming, Web Development | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Squid and Mysql metric scripts for Ganglia

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Silvan Mühlemann

After a long day of meetings and other tedious manager work the perfect way to relax is to code. The best is a mini-projects where you see your results after an hour or so. I call these tasks “Plausch-Projekte” (“plah-oosh … Continue reading →

Posted in IT Infrastructure, PHP, Programming | 10 Comments

Sharedance, Memcached and Cache_Lite

Posted on September 29, 2007 by Silvan Mühlemann

With 125 million page impressions a month and highly dynamic content, caching is essential for tilllate.com. At tilllate, we have worked with several different caching techniques. Before we used caching, we just pre-generated the data: A nightly cron job populates … Continue reading →

Posted in PHP, Programming, Web Development | Comments Off on Sharedance, Memcached and Cache_Lite

PHP5-Entwickler im Aufstieg

Posted on June 24, 2007 by Silvan Mühlemann

“Ihr habt spannende Projekte, ein tolles Team, fünf Wochen Ferien… aber tut mir leid… Ihr arbeitet mit PHP… Ich möchte eher Richtung Java gehen“, hat ein Bewerber für die Software-Entwickler-Stelle seine Absage begründet. Ich denke, das Image von PHP ist … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Web Development | 15 Comments

Textanalyse: Der erste Schritt zum OO-Design

Posted on April 8, 2007 by Silvan Mühlemann

Als ETH-Betriebs- und Produktionsingenieur (Grundstudium Elektrotechnik) weiss ich, wie man triviale Sachverhalte in komplex wirkenden PowerPoint-Slides darstellt. Von sauberem OO-Design wurde mir hingegen nichts beigebracht. So kam es, dass die erste tilllate-Version vom Jahr 2000 aus 30 PHP3-Skripten à je … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

Nachttischlektüre für Programmierer

Posted on December 5, 2006 by Silvan Mühlemann

«Du liest Fachbücher vor dem Einschlafen?», hat man mich gefragt, nach meinem Blog-Beitrag von letzter Woche, «dann träumst Du also von Kopplung und DRY-Prinzip? Reizend. Da lese ich lieber Das Sakrileg und träume von Sophie Neveu.» Bei den meisten anderen … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

Teste häufig: Jede Stunde. Automatisch.

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Silvan Mühlemann

“Teste häufig”, predigt “Der Pragmatische Programmierer”, mein aktuelles Nachttischbuch. Häufiges Testen = automatisches Testen. Denn wer will schon die gleichen Testcases immer und immer wieder durchführen? Funktionstests machen wir mit Selenium, wie früher schon berichtet. Im Normalfall öffnet man den … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Web Development | 3 Comments