For most of my professional career, from 1999-2007 I worked at large corporations (Conde Nast, John Wiley & Sons) and had almost no experience with either startups or small companies. There are huge differences in these work environments and for me, the most troubling was not knowing which problems were normal and which were signs of systemic problems that could kill the company.

I recently switched my blog from Wordpress to Octopress. Below are some thoughts/points I collected during this process.

Getting XDebug setup and working with PhpStorm 2 is relatively painless but I thought I would add some hints I found when setting this up. These instructions assume you are debugging a web based application using MAMP as your server environment.

I needed a full page width image scroller that supported "infinite scrolling" and could handle being positioned, where the 1st image is aligned to something on the page. Poking around I found most jQuery scrollers made use of scrollTo and would not work when the window was the container. So I coded my own as a jQueryUI widget, this widget can be used with any HTML content.