A developer in Brisbane, Australia with a passion for web application development and mountain bikes.
Code portability is the practice of writing code that can be easily reused or transferred between different environments, such as databases or frameworks, with minimal changes. By prioritising portability, developers enhance code maintainability, reduce vendor lock-in, and improve their own adaptability across projects and organisations.
The BikeYoke Revive dropper post is a great piece of kit, but it can be hard to find the correct oil for servicing it. I have found some alternatives that work well and are easier to source.
I recently replaced the frame bearings in my 2018 Focus Jam mountain bike and found it hard to find out exactly which bearings I needed until I had the whole thing apart. To make it easier next time I am sharing my notes from the process.
A dark theme for both the Visual Studio Code (vscode) and Zed editors based on the Paraíso theme from TextMate by Jann T. Sott and Chris Kempson.
Adding delta to your workflow will give you a nice interactive diff so make command line git so much better!
Using git add -p to interactively stage specific parts of a file allowing for more precise control over commits in git. It provides a walkthrough on how to split hunks for granular commit control, ensuring that only desired changes are staged. The post emphasizes the utility of this approach in enhancing commit precision and managing contributions more effectively in git.
Learn how to dynamically load different base images to build application images and for testing using Docker. Utilize build-time variables in a Dockerfile to specify the Node.js version/tag and even extend the flexibility to customize both the image name and tag. Bonus - Discover a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and tests your project against multiple Node.js versions, ensuring compatibility…
Learn to wield nix-shell’s power for precise project dependency management, ensuring hassle-free development environments. Discover techniques for pinning specific Node.js versions, simplifying dependency references, and integrating yarn for enhanced control.
Highlights from the YOW! 2023 conference in Brisbane. This blog post covers engaging talks on topics ranging from creating a programming language for children to real-world applications of WebAssembly. Gain valuable insights from speakers like Felienne Hermans, Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe, Frank Yu, Dylan Beattie, Katie Bell, and Brooklyn Zelenka. Delve into the future of technology, deterministic…
In a departure from common international practices, Australia allows both residents and travellers duty-free purchases under the Tourist Refund Scheme. Buy the goods, get an invoice and you can claim the duty back on the purchase as you depart. Even if you plan to return to Australia with the purchased goods, you can still claim back the tax.
Explore the advantages of cross-compiling in Docker whilst working through a specific case involving a Node.js project using pkg, aiming for a Linux ARM64 architecture in the Docker build.
I made some circuit diagrams for the various versions of the Starving Student Millet Hybrid amplifier, which is a tube/valve headphone amplifier you can build yourself relatively easily for fun.
Here are some of the window management shortcuts that I have discovered and found very useful having moved to working on a Windows 10 machine.
The release of Jest 26 brought a new timer faking interface, which now supports Date mocks. I couldn’t readily find any documentation for this feature so, here is how I used in a project recently.
Old versions of WSL can lead to issues with file system permissions with Node. Upgrading the version of WSL can solve this issue for you.
Rope working fids make it easier to splice ropes, but they can be expensive to buy for a small DIY project. Here are some ideas of how to make your own fids and the required dimensions of each fid size.
To make the construction and maintenance of more advanced types easier it can be helpful to write some tests that ensure their correct function. This sounds a little easier than it turns out to be. As part of the ecosystem for TypeScript Microsoft have written and released the dtslint tool. It can be used to link and compile TypeScript types for static analysis and mostly serves to keep the…
As TypeScript applications get more complex so do the types required to describe it. There are a number of built-in types that can be used for this purpose or combined to create more specialised types. What I term modifying types such as Partial and Required are included in the language and I will quickly cover these first to warm up for the deeper types we’ll address later. This article…
I have recently found myself needing a type for class constructors that is at once generic and tight enough to ensure a genuine constructor. This is useful in situations where you must handle a variety of classes - those that come from other libraries or applications that you cannot control. When writing your own dependency injection container or some other generalised library you cannot know what…
This will be a quick introduction to the lambda calculus syntax, alpha (α) equivalence and beta (β) reduction. What does a lambda look like? I am going to use the identity function as an example for the simplicity it provides. This can be expressed as a lambda function with the notation λx.x. It is a function that when given an argument outputs that argument as its return value. You can also have…
Automated search and replace can be very handy although there are occasions where a human needs to get involved on some of the decisions. If the search term isn’t unique or appears as part of other words or something like that. When this is the case you’ll want a confirm step where you can approve each replacement before it happens. With very little work we can achieve this using a…
In the last article we learnt how to create modified copies of an immutable in PHP. This one is going to tackle an issue I have hitherto skirted around and avoided. Objects in immutable data structures. This article is part of a series I have written on the topic of immutability in PHP code: Part one - a discussion of caveats and a simple scalar handling immutable Part two - improve the process of…
In the last article we learnt how to create an immutable data structure in PHP. There were a few issues to work through, but we got there in the end. Now onto making the immutable class more useful and easier to create modified copies. Note that these are copies and not modifications, in-place, to the original objects. This article is part of a series I have written on the topic of immutability in…
Being a weakly typed dynamic language, PHP has not really had the concept of immutability built into it. We’ve seen the venerable define() and CONSTANTS of course, but they’re limited. Whilst PHP does ship with an immutable class as part of it’s standard library, DateTimeImmutable, there is no immediately obvious method to create custom immutable objects. This article is part of…
When you have a series of applications all running the same database structure it can be annoying to roll out schema updates across all the databases. If you’ve got migrations then great - script their deployment, but when you’re dealing with an old legacy application you probably don’t have the luxury. I was firmly in the latter class of devops when working on a project a couple…
It is important to ensure that Google does not index sites whilst they are still on a staging environment, but you cannot lock it down completely - how would your clients proof it? So I run a simple global rewrite rule in Apache that redirects all requests for robots.txt to a central disallow all response. This works great and Google appears to honour the rule as one would hope. What happens…
Many people have read, reviewed and even implemented the SQL style guide that I wrote. This is great, but there have also been a number of commonly held misconceptions or incorrect readings of the points made in the guide. I have decided to address some of the more common ones via a blog post that will, hopefully, clarify the situation. Basics A lot of people seem to have a very weird…
A very short and simple trick for creating new stdClass objects without having to set every property individually. This is akin to JavaScript’s object notation, but not quite as elegant. Creating a new object in JavaScript looks like the following example. const x = { a: 'test', b: 'test2', c: 'test3', }; With PHP it is possible to use type casting to convert a simple array into a stdClass…
It is with great pleasure that I announce the second edition of the Functional Programming in PHP book that I have been working on. There is twice the content of the first edition of the book as well as updates for PHP 7 and Facebook’s HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine). There are now more functional techniques and patterns included with pipelines, pattern matching and flat maps among them. I…
As a follow on to my short post about namespaces and functions from a year ago I thought it would be worth covering importing a specific function and aliasing functions via namespace operators too. This has been possible since PHP 5.6, but there is a nice addition in PHP 7 I’ll cover towards the end. In the previous article I demonstrated how you can namespace functions and use them, but as…
Pgmodeler is a handy tool for designing databases with an ERD style interface specifically aimed at the PostgreSQL community. It can come in a couple of different ways, but I am going to covering the self build process here. So if you want to learn how to build and install pgmodeler read on! To be able to build anything you’ll need to install the tools from Ubuntu’s repositories. sudo…
I’ve finally found some time to look at my old remote control car again - I was so happy when I bought it as a kid nearly twenty years ago. I’ve still got the original nickel cadmium battery (all 1300mAh!) and charger so I charged it up expecting that there’d be little to no response from the car. Amazingly the kids and I got about 5 minutes of full throttle action out of it…
Way back in 2007 I arrived in London, England ready to start a new chapter of my life working in the big city. I’d left a good job at a web agency in Melbourne - one of the world’s most livable cities - to experience the financial capital of Europe. It was a fantastic time and so much happened I could write a novel, but here are a few highlights.
I use both Vagrant and Ansible to run and provision development virtual machines for testing work locally. This provides an easy to build environment as close to production as possible that all developers can easily create from the source code repository. A simple vagrant up and the associated Ansible scripts will handle all of the configuration and package installation for the VM. This is…
Scrapes can be useful to take static backups of websites or to catalogue a site before a rebuild. If you do online courses then it can also be useful to have as much of the course material as possible locally. Another use is to download HTML only ebooks for offline reading. There are two ways that I generally do this - one on the command line with wget and another through the GUI with httrack.
Not wanting to repeat myself I have written a small bash script to handle the parallel processing of the post images for this site. This involves resizing, cropping and then compressing the images ready for the web. Currently the script supports both JPEG and PNG images for all these operations. On top of this I wanted to ensure that only recently added or modified images would be processed rather…
With the release of PHP 5.3 namespaces became a reality in PHP and they’ve made so much possible including better autoloading. The majority of the time you’ll be used to seeing them at the top of each class file. They can also be used to namespace functions however. A standard PHP namespace declaration would look similar to the following at the top of a class file. namespace…
When you’re working in a team you need ways to easily share and denote good style and taste. This is true of your primary programming language with PEP8 for Python and PSRs 1 & 2 for PHP being well known. There is probably even a style guide for HTML and CSS set out at your company. So why should SQL miss out on the party? I have written a style guide for SQL to promote a consistent code…
I wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian…
Localising sites can be a chore, but PHP has the venerable setlocale() to use system locales. These are like templates or profiles that describe how various types of data should be displayed. Should a price have a comma or point to indicate the decimals? When printing a date should PHP output Monday or Montag? All of these considerations are locale specific and they map to a geographical area.…
Once in a while you come across situations where someone wants to know what a server can do or how many requests it can handle under a realistic load scenario. It could simply be that you want to hit a large selection of sites or even that you want to simultaneously hit a number of different pages on the same site. In my case I am testing the performance of a Drupal multisite installation where…
A little known feature of PHP’s static keyword is that it allows for memoization or function caching. This is a process whereby a functions heavy lifting can be cached so that subsequent calls are faster. It is possible to store any value in a memoized way such as arrays or even objects. This is done without any external side effects - that is to say that the code calling the function will…
It is possible to treat a class instance as a function in PHP. Quite often this is referred to as a functor even though it should really be known as a function object. This is because functions actually serve a different role in languages that support their use. The convenience of having a reusable function that can be overloaded and carry a context is something to weigh up against using functions…
After working hard on the guide to Functional Programming in PHP I am pleased to announce that it has been published by php[architect]! The book is offcially now available and you can purchase your very own copy! If you’re a programmer who wants less bugs and easier testing then this is the functional introduction for you. Throughout the chapters I gently lead you through the various functional…
I was recently invited to join Edd and Michael to appear on the Three Devs and a Maybe podcast to discuss function programming. The recording of our chat is now available so head on over and have a listen. If you haven’t listened to the podcast before there are some 34 past episodes archived there as well! note If you are interested in finding out more about my book on functional programming in…
Since its inception the slow running speed of PHP has been widely publicised and over the years there have been a number of improvements. The first Zend Engine arrived with PHP4 and delivered various performance enhancements (among other features). Each release since this time has delivered some sort of increased efficiency in one way or another. It has become more interesting recently however…
I was recently invited to speak about functional programming in PHP for both BrightonPHP and PHP Hampshire. The details of which are in a previous blog post. If you attended either talk and you’ve yet to leave feedback then please do on the respective Joind.in pages: Brighton PHP joind.in page PHP Hampshire joind.in page You can view the slides from the sessions on my website. I created the slides…
I have been invited to speak at both the upcoming meetings of BrightonPHP and PHP Hampshire about functional programming. This is off the back of the site I created for my (soon to be released) book tentatively entitled Functional Programming in PHP. To get a better idea of what the talk will include I have prepared an abstract: In the PHP world functions are generally sneered at due to their…
In PHP you can easily add a duration to a DateTime instance in a number of ways. I will review the most common methods for completing the task starting with those available on the DateTime object itself. If you are running PHP 5.2 then the only way to achieve this is to call the modify method. This allows you to pass in a date format, but in this case we are most interested in the relative…
As you may know I am currently the maintainer of both Idiorm and Paris; well recently I merged in what looked to be an innocuous pull request from a contributor. Unfortunately this merge had unintended consequences and basically broke the backwards compatibility of the library. Shame on me! After waiting for a patch that would fix the problem and coming up short I decided enough was enough. So…