In 2021, I designed and built a custom split keyboard . I quite enjoy that keyboard, and it has been my daily driver for the past eight months. After completing the hand wired board, I wanted to learn more about electronics, and keyboards. The natural next step to me was to learn how to take my custom layout to the next level of completion.

Like many others, I’ve been exploring new hobbies and learning new skills as the pandemic continues to keep many of us at home. Lately, I’ve been exploring building custom mechanical keyboards.

I’m pretty prone to making stupid mistakes all the time. I think its a mixture of being busy, and being a natural scatter brain. In any case, mistakes happen, and thankfully over time developers have come up with a number of ways to combat mistakes. These usually take the shape in automated toolds. Unit tests are a great way to automated tool to help prevent stupid mistakes from happening, Git commit hooks are another.

I’ve been playing around with Twig in the last few weeks. I was in need of a template parser and wanted to avoid Smarty as I’ve had unpleasant experiences with it in the past, which lead me to Twig.

The documentation for CakePHP has grown in leaps and bounds since the creation of the cookbook. Today I wanted to look at a few methods and conventions that may not be crystal clear from reading the book or api.

Object::_set().

Object is the parent class for almost all other classes in CakePHP.

Indicating to the user which fields are required is something that increases usuability, helping the user fill out the form more effectively and efficiently. These visual cues have absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the document, and would best be handled by CSS.

All versions of Internet Explorer from 5.5 forward support CSS expressions. If you are not familiar with CSS expressions in IE, they are a powerful and non-standard way commonly used to plug the gaping and vast holes in IE’s CSS support.

CakePHP 1.2 is a fantastic improvement over 1.1. However like many, my work has a stable release only policy. So I’m stuck using 1.1 at work for the time being. But after drinking the 1.2 juice, 1.1 is missing some of the potent automagic flavours. First up editing multiple rows in models. The stock syntax is lacking in that it doesn’t support this at all.