Recent content on Professional Blog
With the recent news that the NHS wants to close all its Github repos (see NHS Goes To War Against Open Source and An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open as well as a couple of other ‘war stories’ of what people had seen while working on websites in for the UK Government, someone suggested writing up and sharing my own story of my ups and downs of helping to create a…
A couple of days ago, I had a second interview for a job - after an initial conversation with a tech-lead of the company. I wanted to write a post about it, and praise it as a really good example. What makes it good is that it wasn’t just a pop-quiz about things, and certainly not a leetcode style coding test, but with some real code that the company uses, and that the job deals with on a…
Based on my Reddit comment: One of the most impressive things about Symfony are the deprecation warnings - it will tell you what needs to be changed or upgraded ahead of time (the only time I’ve seen otherwise was a security fix). I’d suggest a quick look at the framework updates as and when they are released to keep up to date with things, to give you plenty of time to update before…
Occasionally, I’ll write small largely stand-alone projects. If they are static HTML & Javascript-based, then creating them as Github pages, available as sub-directories on this site (beyond all the existing pages here) can be a quick and easy way to show them. However, there’s not been a good way to link to them, and show them off - so this is just the introduction to the new page in…
September 2019 On my second visit to An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail, Geoff Marshall (and Vicki!) were one of the guests on-stage. Geoff had made an app for Windows, called the ‘Station Initials Lookup Tool’ that he showed off as part of his set. I thought it would be a fun project to put much the same data online as a simple website. Once I had done that, I looked around for a…
Just a quicky post, that I hope will save someone (or myself) some head-scratching later. TLDR: Whenever you fopen('php://temp', $mode) you get a new file. I found this out when exporting some data from the DB to a spreadsheet/CSV. I was using Yectep\PhpSpreadsheetBundle\Factory (a Symfony bundle around phpoffice/phpspreadsheet) which had a handy method to save the file: $writer =…
Although I’m busy day to day at my current contract *, that isn’t to say that my passions outside the office have come to a complete stop. I’m still going to regular meetups (like the PHP London Meetup and Docker London), and I’m also planning to go to Symfony Live London 2014. I’ve also been reading about, and trying some software, and making the odd fix and new code…
Developers! Trying to work for a company with crappy s/w practices sucks. Don't succumb to Stockholm Syndrome. Do better — @alister@hachyderm.io (@alister_b) February 14, 2013 Discuss at Hacker News It’s never good when someone feels they need to quit a job (or contract) rather than be able to continue, but sometimes, if the environment that they are working is so just so toxic and/or…
I’ve been using TinyDNS, and the associated systems, like DNScache and DaemonTools since 2003, when I was first tasked with setting up a local DNS resolver, and a DNS server for a web-development company I was working at https://www.datasouth.co.uk/ . We had dozens of domain names, and organising the changes - as well as paying per domain name, was getting to be, well, annoying, as well as…
Here is an example of what a little expertise, judiciously applied can do to speed up larger systems. In this case, take a 30 minute run against a MySQL database down to 5 minutes, or less.
Originally posted 2011-12-13 at phpscaling.com . I was out last night at the The Big Xmas Bash , near Silicon Roundabout. It was a fun night out meeting various people, tech, business and recruiters. Oh, the shame though - I was wearing the same T-shirt as someone else - and, yes, I have indeed replaced people with small shell scripts. Now, to the main part of what this post is about - the rant .
It has been in process for a little while, starting when I moved the bulk of my DNS hosting from https://www.bytemark.co.uk/ (with whom I’ve had a small virtual machine since April 2004). One of the things I really like about Bytemark was the free DNS hosting they provided, particularly since they used TinyDNS - which is worthy of its own post. To add a new domain name, create a small file…
Welcome. I’ve taken some time over the holidays to do a little re-organisation of my online presence, and I’d like to tell you what I did, and how. First up, is this site. I’ve been considering what to put onto my Github pages for a while, and I think the most obvious thing are links to my recent work. As it is build on Octopress/Jekyll, it is also well supported by Github, and…
I’ve done a few presentations, Two about Queueing systems, and particularly on BeanstalkD, which is a very excellent system for such job-queues. Beanstalkd is a tool I’ve got some experience in… http://stackoverflow.com/tags/beanstalkd/topusers. Beanstalkd PHP London, May 6th 2010 Queuing, the good and bad London Scalability Group, 16th July 2012 Composer For Package Management…