Whew, what a day!

Just rolled out my first web application (PHP/MySQL of course) which was used by more than 100 people in just one hour. Now for all you professional developers (yeah, like professional developers read my blog) out there, that doesn’t sound like much, and, well, I suppose it isn’t.

But, nevertheless, it was about an 80-90% success, and I’ll explain why. It was a simple web app to collect comments to go under people’s names in our school yearbook. Well, a problem I didn’t anticipate (and really I should have) was that we would have MD5 hash clashes. Not through the algorithm, but the fact that I only generated the hash from a secret word and the current timestamp. That meant that anyone who submitted in the same second as someone else was assigned the same hash, and, needless to say, this caused problems. I should have used microtime() instead of time(), and also used some other unique data to generate the hash. Ah, well, never mind.

That was basically it, that just caused semi-major problems, most of which I could manually deal with. Other than that, the system worked exactly as I planned it to, collecting about 110 comments.

So, learnt my lesson, use microtime() and some other data. I’m off to relax…