A friendly framework reminder

In actuality, this is one of the reasons I started to blog.  Every time I'm at work and accomplish something that I haven't done before or learned a new little trick, I will send myself an email reminding me to blog about it later.  I don't always get to it right away, but I try as soon as I can so I don't forget!

The fact that my team members still need coaching on a regular basis, I thought I would write a brief article about it to encourage everyone else.

Something that will help you remember and provide you a lot of useful information is to maintain a document or "knowledge base" of code snippets that you've used.

The most important things to capture are the following:

• Brief title describing what it is
• Brief description of how you used it, if it's obvious this can be optional
• Example code
• Example output, again another optional one, but could be useful for things difficult to explain
• Where you used it

The last item is something we often omit, when in reality it can be the most important one.  I don't know about you, but many times I remember myself saying, "Oh yeah, I've done that before on..." and I draw a blank as to where it was.  I will often remember, but it would be a lot easier to write it down in an organized fashion and not worry about it again.  I have enough on my mind, I don't need to remember where I've done every neat, little piece of code too!

If you have some ideas to help encourage people to use a framework to it's fullest, feel free to share, I always love hearing other people's opinions and success stories.

Published on Apr 1, 2009

Tags: CakePHP Tutorial | frameworks | Theory