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Alana Storm

the professional weblog; because we have to

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Read No Frills Magento Layout For Free

Just a quick note to announce that I ve made source and build scripts for both versions of No Frills Magento Layout available in a public GitHub repo. I m not open-sourcing the books or publishing them under a creative commons license, but they re both available to read for free for the first time. There are a few reasons for this. First, over the next few months I hope to modernize the…

Temporarily Halting Commerce Bug and No Frills Sales

The US social safety net is a weird collection of laws and policies. We don t have a national system of last resort where residents can receive payments to support themselves while they re out of work. We used to have that, it was called welfare, and the federal government outsourced that to the individual state governments in the 1990s. Each state government can decide what sort of welfare system…

Accessing Docker Desktop’s Virtual Machine

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer, Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers, and Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production. This is the most recent post in the series. Containers (in the modern sense) are a technology…

Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer, and Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers. Later posts include Accessing Docker Desktop's Virtual Machine. First the container/docker/K8s approach presumes that your application can easily run as a stand-alone…

Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer. Later posts include Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production, and Accessing Docker Desktop's Virtual Machine. Docker s one of those weird bits of technology where, depending on how you start…

Trying to Understand Mastodon’s Federation

Mastodon is a decentralized, federated social network technology. With Twitter recently realizing its investor s goals via an unorthodox sale to a wealthy entrepreneur and industrial scion with hard-right-leaning values, many people have wondered whether the platform will remain a useful or habitable place. Mastodon has been suggested as a possible Twitter replacement, and I ve been trying to…

That Efficiency of Programming Languages Image

In recent years there s this image that will make the rounds with a ranking of programming languages by energy efficiency. If you haven t seen it, it looks like this. I want to be careful here because I m not a researcher. I don t design studies and I don t know how to design studies or anything about the environment folks will typically design studies in. This is intended as a critique of the…

What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Later posts include Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers, Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production, and Accessing Docker Desktop's Virtual Machine. I’ve been using containers in development environments for a number of years. Usually via Docker Desktop. At this point, I have an…

Commerce Bug and PHP 8.1/Magento 2.4.4

I recently pulled myself out of Magento retirement to give Commerce Bug a few minor adjustments that should make it Magento 2.4.4 and PHP 8.1 compatible. If you re still seeing problems get in touch and we ll get you sorted out. The extension ran into a few issues with PHP 8.1 s new levels of strictness around types. For what it s worth, while I dislike PHP s direction w/r/t stricter typing by…

Solo IT Budgeting for a Fading Business

One of my background projects this year is reducing the paid services that my software company, Pulse Storm, makes use of. These aren t gigantic costs, but sales of Commerce Bug and No Frills Magento Layout have steadily declined as Adobe has methodically retired the Magento brand and the Open Source version of Magento has become an almost private project used exclusively by official Magento…