{5} Setfive - Talking to the World - Page 35 of 66 - Ramblings on code, startups, and everything in between

Earlier this week we were repeatedly getting notifications about a “usort() Array was modified by the user comparison function” warning for one of our new Symfony2 projects. The weird thing was the sort function was relatively straightward and looked something like:

Obviously not modifying the array. Anyway, Daum dug up this StackOvervlow thread which suggested that using introspection methods silently modify the array and trigger the warning but I’m clearly not using any of those either.

After some more poking around, we ran across a Doctrine bug specifically mentioning the usort issue. It turns out, because of how Doctrine’s lazy loading functionality works if the usort callback function causes Doctrine to lazy load it’ll silently modify the array and cause that warning. Great, so how do you fix it? It’s actually pretty straightforward, you just need to force the lazy loading before sorting the collection. I ended up with something like:

Anyway, fun fact of the day. Questions and comments always welcome.

We’ve been using CSS preprocessors for some time now but it wasn’t until recently that the reasons for using them really started coalescing for me. CSS preprocessors, like LESS or Sass, basically allow you to write CSS in a more powerful intermediate language which is then compiled down to normal CSS. Like a lot of developers, when I first started using LESS I had some reservations about introducing another layer of abstraction to our development stack. However, after developing a few reasonably sized projects with LESS I’m convinced that using a preprocessor is probably a great idea for many types of projects.

Avoiding the LESS vs. Sass discussion and looking at preprocessors as a class of tools, the clearest benefits are more expressiveness and better reusability.

More expressiveness

As a language, CSS is amazingly straightforward, it basically consists of selectors and rules which are written in flat, plain text files and then combine to style your HTML. Since there are no constructs for variables, conditionals, or functions writing CSS is simple – just fire up and editor and start making changes. The ease of writing and understanding CSS is certainly a benefit but it comes at the price of sacrificing how expressive the language can be.

Using selector specificity as an example, the benefits of the preprocessed files are clear.

Using regular CSS you might end up having rules that look like:

Versus the corresponding LESS:

Looking at the two examples, the LESS uses its structure to express how the nesting rules work and because of this has a higher information density than the regular CSS.

Another common issue where increased expressiveness is helpful is in writing semantically meaningful CSS class names. With regular CSS, the tendency was to normally end up with CSS rules that end up looking like:

The trouble of course being that the CSS class names are tied to their physical appearance as opposed to what they actually mean in your app. Although its possible to write semantic class names in vanilla CSS, the difficulty arises when you’re trying to uniformly apply things like colors, padding, and borders across a range of elements. Without variables and mixins it becomes significantly harder to manage or change these semantically named classes. Looking at how Twitter Bootstrap defines buttons, its clear how much more expressive the declarations are by keeping the colors in easily changed variables:

Better reusability

Another benefit which preprocessors introduce is better code reusability. Although CSS has imports, the amount of code which you can functionally reuse is pretty limited since existing rules can’t be included into new ones. The best you can really hope for is being able to reuse a common stylesheet across projects. Comparatively, preprocessed CSS offers mixins and functions both of which foster more reuse.

Some of the best real world examples of this are in the Twitter Bootstrap mixins.less file which includes mixins used throughout the framework. Additionally, projects that build upon the Bootstrap framework would also be able to leverage any functions or mixins Bootstrap defines further increasing reuse.

Anyway, looking at the benefits compared to the overhead of involving a preprocessor I think for any reasonably sized project you’d almost always be better of developing with one. It’s obviously going to come down to the specific project but I’d be interested in hearing everyone else’s opinion.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine a couple of days and we started chatting about the online dating space. As we were talking, we both started nodding our heads in agreement that as an outsider, the space seems relatively interesting for a couple of reasons:

Unlike the vast majority of the consumer web, people are actually conditioned to pay for online dating and there is an established SaaS model.
Users seem to be open to trying new apps and sites – in the last few years several new sites have become popular like tinder, HowAboutWe, and grindr.
There’s a high degree of fragmentation with dozens of sites targeting specific user segments – Christianmingle.com, Farmersonly.com, and Bbbwdating.com

Obviously, life isn’t all rosy starting or running an online dating site since there’s an obvious “chicken/egg” problem, a significant user churn rate, and of course strong competition. Anyway, since Spark Networks (owns JDate and Christian Mingle among others) is a publicly traded company I decided to skim through their annual report in search of interesting tidbits. Here’s a couple of the most interesting things:

From The Spark Networks Annual Report

On most of our Web sites, the ability to initiate most communication with other members requires the payment of monthly subscription fees, which represents our primary source of revenue.
We hold two United States patents for our Click! technology, the first of which expires January 24, 2017, that pertain to an automated process for confidentially determining whether people feel mutual attraction or have mutual interests.
Click! is important to our business in that it is a method and apparatus for detection of reciprocal interests or feelings and subsequent notification of such results. The patents describe the method and apparatus for the identification of a person’s level of attraction and the subsequent notification when the feeling or attraction is mutual.
For the year ended December 31, 2012, we had 259,244 average paying subscribers, representing an increase of 32.0% from the year ended December 31, 2011.
Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2012 increased 27.3% to $61.7 million from $48.5 million in 2011.
Net (loss) Income and Net (loss) Income Per Share. Net loss was $15.0 million, or $0.72 per share, for the year ended December 31, 2012, compared to a net loss of $1.6 million or $0.08 per share in 2011.
For 2011, the CEO of Spark took home a total of $990,000 between cash and equity.

Some interesting stuff there. Looking at their revenue number, a little back of the envelope math would suggest they’re averaging around $20/mon for subscription revenue since 260k users x $20/mon x 12 months is roughly $62 million.

Ok great, but where are the opportunities? Looking at AngelList the majority of startups seem to be focussing on building traditional dating websites with a unique hook like “date friends of friends”, “ivy league dating”, “gamified dating”. Unfortunately, given the intense competition, chicken/egg problem, and capital that companies like Spark and IAC are spending on marketing I don’t think starting a new dating site is currently the best play. I think focussing on “selling the tools to the miners” is the best bet right now, potentially around a couple of themes.

Concierge Service

Think a virtual assistant like FancyHands but specifically aimed at online dating. Need a couple of great date ideas? The concierge has you covered. Need some help writing or polishing up your profile? Covered. As a business perspective, you’d generate monthly subscription revenue with the opportunity to generate additional revenue via referrals while costs generally increased linearly. There are a couple of companies doing this already but no one has serious traction.

Meta Search Engine

It’s 2013 and users are still effectively stuck searching one dating website at a time looking for “mr right”. You would fix this by building a “meta search engine” to allow users to search all the sites they’re a member of at the same time from a single interface. There are obviously technological as well as legal constraints to this but I think the potential value add is huge. Running this as a business would be tough since you’d always be at the mercy of the individual sites who would be well within their rights to shut you down like Craigslist and PadMapper. But who knows, maybe you could negotiate favorable terms in exchange for pushing users to register for new sites.

Browser Extension Power Tools

The goal would to build a handful of “power tools” to improve the overall experience of online dating. Example tools might be a Bayesian spam filter to learn what users flag as “spammy” and automatically block similar messages. Or maybe an “expert advisor” that analyzes messages you send and recommends changes in order to improve your response rate. The business model would be simple, sell the extension in the Chrome Webstore and charge a monthly subscription fee.

Anyway, just some off the cuff ideas – would love to hear any feedback or other ideas.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine looking to engage in the community asked me which experienced PHP developers he should follow on Twitter. An interesting question, and as I started looking through the @setfive follower list I realized we really don’t follow very many. Anyway, not wanting to leave him hanging, I put together a list of 5 developers that I thought were a good start.

This is obviously just a start, but I’d love everyone’s help to build out a list of solid PHP developers to follower on Twitter. If you leave them in the comments, we’ll pull together a single list and update this post once we have it!

Fabien Potencier

Co-founder and CEO for @SensioLabs, founder and project lead for @Symfony.
Tweeting from @fabpot and on the web at http://fabien.potencier.org

Jonathan Wage

Husband to @meganswage and director of technology @OpenSky. @ServerGrove @Symfony @DoctrineORM
Tweeting from @jwage and on the web at http://jwage.com/

Kris Wallsmith

Lead architect & symfony guru at @opensky. lead dev on assetic, buzz, spork. father of 3, widower of 1.
Tweeting from @kriswallsmith and on the web at http://kriswallsmith.net/

Chris Corbyn

Nerd, englishman, chatterbox, cake-a-holic, celery hater, Italophile, nu-melbournite, SitePoint/Flippa code monkey. I’m also @cosadici.
Tweeting from @d11wtq and on the web at http://chriscorbyn.co.uk

Dustin Whittle

Technologist, Architect, Open Source Advocate
Tweeting from @dustinwhittle and on the web at http://dustinwhittle.com/

Dries Buytaert

Creator of Drupal, Drupal project lead, co-founder and CTO of Acquia, and Mollom spam fighter.
Tweeting from @Dries and on the web at http://buytaert.net/

Lukas Smith

My twitter alter-ego is all about PHP and databases. My coding addiction is financed by @liip.
Tweeting from @liip and on the web at http://www.liip.ch/en

Joseph Bielawski

Software Developer – #Symfony2 #PHP Polish Twitter Translator
Tweeting from @stloyd and on the web at https://github.com/stloyd

Robin Muilwijk

Board member, eZ Publish Community Project Board : Open Source Advocate : Community Management : Social Media : Civil Servant : Information / Data Engineer
Tweeting from @i_robin and on the web at http://www.linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk

Anthony Ferrara

Anything Regarding Software Security, Performance, Quality and Architecture…
Tweeting from @ircmaxell and on the web at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/

Nikita Popov

18 year old student enjoying programming :)
Tweeting from @nikita_ppv and on the web at http://nikic.github.io/

Igor Wiedler

Philosopher.
Tweeting from @igorwesome and on the web at https://igor.io/

Matthew Weier O’Phinney

PHP and ZF Developer; crazed father of two.
Tweeting from @mwop and on the web at http://www.mwop.net/

William Durand

Student by day, full stack developer by night. Open-Source evangelist all the time.
Tweeting from @couac and on the web at http://careers.stackoverflow.com/williamdurand

Jordi Boggiano

Passionate web developer, specialized in web performance and php, #Composer lead, #Symfony2 developer. Partner at @nelmio, information junkie and speaker.
Tweeting from @seldaek and on the web at http://seld.be/

Giorgio Sironi

Developer at @Onebip. I search for the harmony between form and context. Software, science, economics.
Tweeting from @giorgiosironi and on the web at http://www.giorgiosironi.com/

Last week, I was working on a Symfony2 app where I wanted to generate optgroup tags inside the select box of an Entity form type. After poking around, I ran across a StackOverflow answer explaining how to do it. Basically, it turns out what you have to do is manually return a “choices” array from a class that has access to the Entity Manager. I ended up adding a method to my custom repository and passing that repository into my form:

It’s a bit messy and I’m surprised there isn’t an option on the Entity Type to pass in a callback with access to the Entity Manager to generate a choice list. Looking at the source of DoctrineType it looks like you could potentially create a custom type to extend the Entity type and then access the em from your custom function. Even that though, seems like overkill to accomplish something that is reasonably common.

Symfony2: usort() Array was modified by the user comparison function

Should you be using a CSS preprocessor? Probably.