José Mota — Web engineer & architect

Latest blog posts

To show or not to show [registered user only actions]

Last week I struggled with a design decision that really caught my attention. Consider this:

  • You have a user driven app on the web.
  • You also provide some actions for guests.

What you would do? Either:

  1. Don’t show the user only actions? (my opinion: this one reduces clutter on your interface).
  2. Or do show them and when the user clicks the links/buttons, the user gets a login redirected page for every new click?

My pick would be number 1. Why?

I’d rather have a welcome page that showed you what to use in case you signed up. Actions such as creating a new item on a product list and message sending that apparently require a sign up are confusing for a guest. Besides, clicking on such an action and redirecting you to a login page several times is not that much of an engaging experience.

Feel free to add up on this thought.

April 20th, 2010 — Leave a comment!

I read “REWORK”. I loved it.

REWORK is by far the best book I’ve read in my whole life. Even though I read very few books, this one shattered my doubts about wanting to make my own business away. After reading this book — if you must know, I read it in under 24 hours —, I feel happier about myself, i feel more confident and I also feel more relaxed. My potential as a business owner is as big as everyone else’s, including Jason’s and David’s, the very authors of the book. Thanks to them, my maturity towards achieving the future I dream of grows bigger by the day. Read the rest of this entry »

March 26th, 2010 — 10 comments so far

Zend Framework: friend or foe?

Yesterday I started working for Goweb, a portuguese web development agency. I’m working as a Zend Framework developer and I must say I’m very surprised for what I’m learning from the experience so far. It has its unique philosophy – if I can call it like that – and way of coding.

It’s not just another MVC framework. It’s a set of PHP classes (one of them actually enables MVC and makes it work stand-alone) that allows you to focus a little more on your application logic rather than spending time on fixing technical bugs.

Read the rest of this entry »

January 27th, 2010 — 2 comments so far