Maxime Bernard's blog

Hi there!

As I read about AngularJS controversy about ng-controller, I was looking for other MVC just to make my own idea about it and found this very interesting article (which does not talk about ng-controller controversy but enlights about the pros and cons of Angular, Backbone & Ember.

Hi there,

I've just found this little tool provided by Brace.io who offers you to have a small website with static pages data-hosted by a google spreadsheet.

All the knowledge you need is some HTML/CSS and the VERY easy-to-learn Mustache templates to display or post your data.

It could be very convenient for those who don't have developer knowledge but are familiar with web. Besides, Google Spreadsheets as a "database" is reliable.

Currently working on a project using AngularJS, I was having a hard time with $scope issues. Here is what I read and everything became much more clear.

If you're using AngularJS and you are not familiar (or a bit afraid), you should definitely take a look at this article. Helps a lot.

Visual Representation of SQL Joins & Cheat Sheet.

If you like this, you might want to take a look at the original article explaining in details: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/33052/Visual-Representation-of-SQL-Joins

Hi there,

I wanted to share one of my feed I found very interesting. From my experience, it's a bit more complicated than explained but here is my point of view (read the suggested article first).

Manage your financials and physical assets. Indeed! Getting resources now or later does not change the fact that everything you buy must be named somewhere because it becomes value of your company now.

Develop your business plan. In my opinion, this one is THE MOST IMPORTANT. First because it will drive your startup. Second because it will be the best document you can give to your investors.

Product development process. If you're going AGILE, it's easy: this is your product backlog and all past sprints. If you don't, it's the roadmap you're going with and other specifications. Since I'm a big fan of this, I suggest you to give a try to Lean Management & Agile since they're both great tools, well documented and work well together.

Funding process. This one is more or less true. It applies well in USA but not so well in Europe. But you still need to know how much time can you stand without any additional funding and what are the options once you get there.

Manage human resources. Seems obvious but remember one thing: adding more human resources gets you more work, Management.

Leverage information technology. Since I'm an information technology engineer, the only thing I could add is: Ask him/her what are the first things he/she thinks that need to be set up. Always cross your ideas about what's more important to be done first.

Billing and revenue collection. I did not had the opportunity to get myself there but one thing we kept in our mind: this will time-eating.

Customer service and support. Most of the time, this is the part where people forget about. The customer service (and Tony Hsieh explained this quite well in Delivering Happiness) is one of the most important part of your startup. It is your image. Deal with it the best you can because in the end, if your customers are happy, this is a good sign for your future.

In the end, if you're doing this, it's not about your investors concluding or not your startup is a hobby, it's about you doing what is necessary for your startup to succeed.

I hope the article and my experience brought you some advice. If you need anything, you can reach me by pm on Twitter.

Hi there,

  It's been a long time now I'm using SCRUM as my main project management methodology and I rather enjoyed this article. It tells more about SCRUM's downsides. It does not mean SCRUM is a bad thing: I'm still convinced it's the best option right now. But it points out what you should be aware of and deal with it.

  Here is the link: Why Scrum is fundamentally broken (but we still use it)?

Because it's always a good thing to read (and read again) some useful advices, here is a list I got from Prezi, a cloud-based presentation webapp and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas.

It's been a while now since I last posted. No, I did not die, I had just a big break to start my own company.

Should I go MongoDB or MySQL?

That's why I just did some research about MongoDB and MySQL. If you already know both, you would tell me: "Man, this is completely diffferent, you can't just benchmark this". I agree. One is schema-less, not-relational database (MongoDB), the other one (MySQL) is not.

People will tell you "it depends on your needs". But most of the times, it is not so simple. You may need both actually. One for your "Big Data" (god, I hate this word), one for your relational data. 

For example, you have users and you have movies. Your movies should definitely go to MongoDB since you want your users to be able to look for your millions movies quickly. But you also want your users to have notifications, points and relations with other users in which case MySQL is more appropriate.

That's when you wonder if you should use only MySQL, only MongoDB or both of these databases. So I did a little research and here's what I found:

StackOverflow - Mysql vs Mongodb 1000 reads which was great because Sean Reilly did really well explain how they both work and how you can boost performance using one or another.

MoreDevs - MySQL vs MongoDB performance benchmark which was great because you can really see by yourself in which use case one is better than the other.

Is MongoDB always faster then MySQL? is great to go further. You will learn why MySQL and MongoDB are so different: most of it is related on how they are processing queries (and all the lock mechanism). You will also learn about the importance of using indexes in MongoDB.

ORM & ODM

Before jumping to the conclusion, I will also talk about ORMs since I checked that up a little bit. First of all, ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) such as Doctrine (PHP), Hibernate (Java) or EntityFramework (.NET) are to SQL Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ...) what ODM (Object Document Mapper) such as DoctrineMongo (PHP), Mandango (PHP) are to NOSQL Databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, ...).

This layer of abstraction helps the developer by building itself queries to the database and instantiate objects after fetching data in the database. It's a really big time-saver and it's great for flexibility and future maintenance.

My dear friend Mathieu Pheulpin who has worked with both Doctrine (ORM) and DoctrineMango (ODM) explained to me that they are both great tools but you should always consider using it... or not. 

If you are looking for highest performance, not using it is the best way to go since you will be able to query the database exactly the way you want.

On the other hand, if you are looking for flexibility, maintenance and simpler code, you should definitely give a hand to ORM/ODM.

Since my performance key is on retreiving movies, I will use an ORM for my users and no ODM for my movies. I will tell you in some future if my choice was wise or not.

Conclusion

To conclude this post, as you read, the choice between MongoDB vs MySQL (and moreover NOSQL vs SQL) is not so simple. In real world, you often need both. The best way to go with this is to check your needs.

Do you need big "JOIN"s? In which case, this data might be better in a SQL DB. 

Do you often need to process a large amount of data? In which case, this data might be better in NOSQL DB.

Since a demo worth 10 000 words, see it by youself: http://wagerfield.github.io/parallax/

Here is a preview picture to convince you to take a look ;-)

I just got the exact same feelings!

Need some refreshment about favicon: take a look here: https://github.com/audreyr/favicon-cheat-sheet.

Have you heard about Compass ? Compass is an open-source CSS Authoring Framework. You write your CSS in a specific way that Compass will help you build the final CSS file.

Today, I discovered one mixin (kind of "css function") that is able to build a sprite using a directory of pictures and creating the final sprite picture and all the css rules applying to it.

I just this website which lets you build your own font by uploading your svg pictures. You don't have svg files ? No problem: use the free ones provided by IcoMoon.

Icon Fonts is really a great way to get rid of sprites hell since you don't have to put every size and color of your icon. 1 svg and you're done !

If you don't know anything about Icon Fonts, you should really take a look !