Projects are slippery, unruly beasts! In a previous project management article it was mentioned you should use an Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, to help tame them. This article follows up by looking a bit closer at Scrum, hopefully enticing you to start using it to manage your projects if you aren’t already.

There are many ways in which a project can fail. It can fail because deadlines aren’t met, budgets are exceeded, etc. What can you do as a technical project manager to minimize your chances of adding “leader of a failed project” to your resume?

Programmers like to talk about functional programming, but if you ask any of them if they’ve ever done it, many would reply “No”. The reason is quite simple: we are taught to think in an imperative manner when we first start learning to program, in terms of flow charts and steps to be followed in the program. Challenge the way you think with this article and learn the basic concepts of functional programming.

Business screens are different from the pages we’re used to developing for a blog or website. The way input fields are organized and the efficiency with which one can go through a page and enter data is very important for business users. This final part of the i series looks at what goes into making usable screens.

The i is a very wonderful machine and there are lot of opportunities for brave PHP programmers who venture into this realm. Here we continue out look at life with the i from a PHP developer’s perspective and focus on what the terrain looks like.

We’ve talked about a lot of weird things so far on PHPMaster (well, at least I think some of them are weird), but this may take the cake. In this series I want to talk to you about PHP – and the IBM I. That’s right, the IBM i, formerly known as System i and before that as the AS/400. Let’s start by dispelling the myth that the i is dinosaur; it’s actually a very wonderful machine, and there are lot of opportunities for brave PHP programmers who venture into this realm.

Although the “Dependency Injection = Inversion of Control” equation can generally be considered valid, the concept of IoC is actually much broader. In fact, it could be said that DI is a specific use case which exploits IoC’s benefits, but it’s far from being the only one. So what’s IoC really then? Find out in this article!

You know that Composer is a resolver for managing external project dependencies and versioning constraints, but is that all it does? With a little creativity, certainly not! In this article you’ll see how Composer can also be used as a basic build automation tool.

The dictate of the Open/Closed Principle is pretty much the mantra that we’ve heard so many times before: “Don’t hack the core”. The key to achieving adherence is designing your components as polymorphic elements whose behavior is defined through abstract contracts. From that point onward, you can extend them either through Inheritance or Composition. Learn more about the Open/Closed Principle with this article and how it can help you build more robust, extensible systems.

The Law of Demeter is a powerful paradigm whose primary goal is to promote the implementation of highly-decoupled application components by eliminating any unnecessary mediators. Just follow its commandments explained in this article and you’ll see the quality of your code improve. Guaranteed.