My curiosity about ETags (Entity Tags) was first piqued when reading over Github's API documentation. Looking into them, I saw that there explanation often pointed to them as a "cacheing" mechanism.

In looking to build a RESTful API, an important consideration is how to handle errors. Most errors are displayed to users in HTML, as these are web applications. However, API's need some special care.

Here's how to get started really quickly with Laravel 4. Updated since Laravel 4's official release!

If you make judicious use of IoC containers (and Dependency Injection), you'll likely end up with lots of Bindings, some of which may look like:

I like to create my own library for any application. Similarly, I like keeping the "models" directory clean - I only add Laravel classes (Usually Eloquent instances) inside of the "model" folder.

Laravel encapsulates HTTP requests and responses within PHP objects. As you likely know, the HTTP core of Laravel revolves around Symfony's HTTPFoundation component.

Laravel uses Exceptions for error handling. This includes both HTTP error codes and application (run-time) errors.

Quick (and dirty) tip:

For desktop, I love native apps - They run smoothly, they have great OS integrations, and they often get away with a polish impossible on the web.

Ubuntu has an OS targeted for smart phones. After my initial excitement at the prospect of having an OS I could really nerd out on (Really hoping for a Terminal app), I realized one thing: I don't use any of Ubuntu's graphical tools.

Last week, during our break, we switched from a hosted Exchange service to Google Enterprise. The main driver to change was lack of space - some of us have emails going back 7 years and have accrued many gigabytes of data. Adding more available space was getting too costly.

Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality.

Does your business scale? Does your platform scale? Do you scale? What is scale?

Using Tasksel and installing the lamp-server package still gives you php 5.3. Here's how to install a LAMP server with php 5.5.

If you need or want a great full-text search engine, and you decide on Sphinx Search, here's how to install it on Ubuntu. I'm using 12.04 LTS Ubuntu Server.