Hackers, and we use the word here as defined by Paul Graham and others before him, are gonna hack. By nature, a hacker will have the tendency to poke break things and their trains of thought will often be driven by the phrase I wonder if, as illustrated by Randall Munroe in this neat XKCD strip.

A hacker mindset is one of experimentation and learning, an outlook that values process over outcome and knowledge over deliverables. Although this may seem counter-productive when approached from a traditional business mindset, if fostered, this attitude can quickly become the backbone of a SME.

Research and Development

As a startup ourselves, we always looked to hire hackers. We favoured code over resumes and community involvement over industry certifications. We not only tolerated the hacker mindset, we encouraged it.

We like it when our programmers build stuff.

We have our projects of course, and we do have deliverables, but the atmosphere inside the company allows for innovation outside our core products and services. Our programmers routinely contribute to FOSS projects and we’ve often ended up using their hobby code in company solutions. They power are our R&D.

Even if their side projects never contributed to the company though, we’d still encourage them. Why? Because for hackers, building stuff is a reflex action. It’s a part of the process that makes them who they are. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, hackers build stuff because they like building things, and that’s not something which everyone gets.

We do – hackers gonna hack.

Sometimes it can lead to good code, sometimes it can lead to a fix or a new way of doing things, and sometimes it can lead to nothing.

But that’s all right. We encourage this process because in the end every small business is in the business of building things, whether they’re products, services or relationships.

As the modern web trends go, jQuery has become the front runner in bringing the client side Javascript to a common platform. But will it be able to bring the same level of success when it comes to mobile where there’s a gaping gap for a common platform ? As a bunch of developers interested in mobile apps we certainly do hope so.

jQuery mobile framework takes the “write less, do more” mantra to the next level: Instead of writing unique apps for each mobile device or OS, the jQuery mobile framework will allow you to design a single highly branded and customized web application that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet platforms.

http://jquerymobile.com/2010/08/announcing-the-jquery-mobile-project

Remember the old age (not far behind… just few years ago) where you had to type a whole bunch of codes just to add a new row to your HTML table ? I’ve almost forgotten that era with the convenience added through some of these libraries.

The Javascript Libraries That Shape The New Web

Earlier this week, Google posted on how to make PHP performance better as step of their campaign to “make the web faster”, but has given some noteworthy tips (such as avoiding SQL querying within a loop) as well as some insignificant ideas.

This may have been ignored if it was published in some other source, but since it’s endorsed by Google, PHP community has taken a special interest and rebuffed some of these so called tips.

A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices

Make the Web Faster – Google groups

PHP performance tips from Google

Interesting twist to CSS and PHP.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of using PHP with websites, is getting variables into CSS. Having variables stored in an ini file, config file or even a database can make the updating of the look and feel of a site simple, however, CSS files, by default, do not parse PHP.

Embedding PHP In CSS

PHP V5′s object-oriented features give you the ability to implement design patterns to improve your code’s design. When you improve your code’s design in this way, it becomes more readable, more maintainable, and more robust to absorb changes.

Five more PHP design patterns

We’ve been keeping close watch on Magento Commerce from it’s release. It has really filled the void of an open source e-commerce system. However, it seems there are several concerns when it is to be used in production.

Magento Commerce has been criticized in the past for being too bloated. I agree it is. A single, uncached page load takes as much as 20MB of memory, which is a bit much for a web application. While Magento can be criticized for being too bloated, many other popular apps are bloated, and that bloat can generally be solved by server tuning and hardware. The issue of Magento extends further to a much more important issue: security vulnerabilities in the administration panel.

Magento Commerce Security Vulnerabilities

Work is being done to incorporate Windows binaries for PECL extensions into pecl.php.net and will hopefully be ready early 2009

As a Catholic, to me, Christmas has always been about giving. Of course, this time around I thought I’d go the extra mile and share some virtual love with geeks everywhere. Inspired by 24 Ways, I decided to do my part this season by writing an article a day on something that is very dear to me – Ruby.

Focused on tips, tricks and hacks to try out during these few weeks, Ruby Advent aims to be a resource for newbies and veterans alike. As we reflect on the year gone by, and spend time with the people we care about this holiday season, it’s also good to look to the future, and exercise our collective brain power in anticipation of one of the most challenging years ahead. Ruby Advent is a chance to make some friends, hack some code, and stay in the spirit of the season throughout.

Of course, the main focus of Ruby Advent is community, and in this vein I’d like to thank the people who linked, and these guys who contributed, and many, many others for getting behind us and powering this project through.

Whether you’re a hobbyist, hacker or code machine extraordinaire, it should be obvious by now that the Ruby community has hacks and hugs galore to give this season. Join the party at Ruby Advent and see what we’re talking about!

We know most of you enjoy using CurdBee for your business’ billing needs. Being a small team from Sri Lanka, we’re always spiffed to see a tool we built to scratch our itch helps thousands of others across the globe. Of course, we also love listening to you and and adding new features. As we push out this new update, here are some of the new bells and whistles you should be looking for.

Total Billed
Many of you requested this feature, mentioning how convenient it would be for you when making your balance sheets. We’ve added an extra column in the invoices section that shows the total amount billed.

Your Name on All Notifications
Did invoices sent through CurdBee confuse your clients and end up in their spam folder? From now on all invoice notifications will use your business name when sending email.

Format your Item Descriptions
Need your invoices to be more descriptive? Now you have the freedom to do basic formatting on item descriptions (using Textile syntax) such as adding line-breaks, emphasizing text and even adding links.

Custom Due Dates
Don’t you wish your clients would pay up on time so you can throw that massive New Year’s Eve party? With this newest update, you can now specify custom due-dates for your invoices. Click away, and party hard!

Better custom branding
Worried about your company colour not being in the colour pallete? With this update we introduce a new color picker which allows you to create custom tints and shades. Now it’s even easier to make sure those colours keep flying!

Please let us know if you experience any issues with these new additions. We love squashing bugs (but not bees, obviously) with large objects. As always, we’re also looking for more suggestions on how to make CurdBee better. Our support mail box and forum are always open, and we love hearing from you, so please write in! As for us, we’ll be here as usual, hacking away.

Stay tuned for more great releases from the CurdBee team!