Gotbadger

Anyone who knows me will know how much I enjoy a glass of nice cider, they may have even heard me rave on about a particular cider works; biddenden’s. Now rewind a few years to when I first discovered real cider I was at the beer festival in Newcastle a lively even run by the Newcastle arm of CAMRA not being a big real ale drinker I decided to try some of the ciders, that moment changed my view of ciders. When people say cider you usually get this image of kids in a park drinking 2 liters of what might charitably be called piss, the real cider I tasted that day was like biting into the best tasting apple you have ever eaten.

Anyway fast forward a few years and now luckily for me the range of ciders you can get is expanding in decent pubs you now have a choice of more than strongbow and woodpecker but wait it gets better! Now the cider works themselves are starting to sell direct and that brings me back to biddenden’s. I first discovered there cider while in Kent we visited the vineyard/ciderworks and bought a couple of bottles which I then consumed far too quickly luckly on the back of one of the bottles I spotted a domain name, the rest is history. For about £40 you can get 12 litres of the good stuff shipped to your door, this Christmas I’m thinking about getting a case of spiced cider known as ‘Monks Delight’ (lovely warm) to pass those cold evenings

The people at sitepoint are giving away one of their books, check it out at http://rails.sitepoint.com its free for the next 60 days so get it while you can…

It was in some respects a long time coming like a lot of people out there I have made the move to word-press and for once actually managed to create a semi-decent (I think) looking theme. I liked Mephisto but I couldn’t do ‘things’ with it. It kind of leads me into what I have been having quite some thought about latley and that is PHP.

I ve had somewhat of a resurgence in my love for PHP, Ive been toying with RoR and done some C# stuff recently at work and I came to miss the pure dirtiness of PHP. The reason I originally had started to hate PHP can probably be pinned on two things; doing maintenance on existing projects and as a result writing increasingly hacky and horrible code. The change of heart came from realising finally that I could write beautiful OO PHP5 that was incredibly rewarding to write if I wanted to. The epiphany was mostly down to the fact that programing in a language like C# made me give up a lot of my bad programing habits. Its quite easy to write bad C# apps but it quickly becomes quite self evident how horrendous it is, while doing something equally bad in PHP like mixing up function with formatting isn’t so obvious until much later when problems start cropping up. By bringing these good habits from C# and RoR to PHP5 I can write much more reliable and readable code thats also fairly agile. This article by Derek Sivers kinda sums things up.