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 [...]
astormThe 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 [...]
astormThis 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 [...]
astormThis 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 [...]
astormThis 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 [...]
astormMastodon 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 [...]
astormIn 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 [...]
astormThis 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 [...]
astormI 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. [...]
astormOne 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 [...]
astormAs an older a more experienced programmer person this tweet fascinates me how are React apps commonly structured with common meta frameworks/libs? (size = how common files/folders are in X starter projects, color = type) next steps are figuring out a better way to find "codebases of popular websites that use X", instead of [...]
astormI was looking at some of the new features that are coming to PHP 8.1 and I saw enums were on the list. I also saw that PHP’s continuing its pattern of reusing keywords in different contexts to mean different things. An enum in PHP 8.1 looks like this enum Status { case DRAFT; case PUBLISHED; case ARCHIVED; } That’s the case [...]
astormToday’s just some “blog as bookmarks” energy. First — this article on how to install a python development environment on your mac in order to avoid-but-not-destroy the system /usr/bin/python. Second — “how to install” docs on Apache Airflow. Third — What I’ve learned about data [...]
astormI refinanced my home loan this year. This means I have a new mortgage servicer. Mortgage servicers accept and track loan payments for the folks who actually own my loan. Mortgage servicers also forward on my property insurance and property tax payments to my insurer and the county at the end of the year. There’s a portion of my [...]
astormAccording to this here web site, I launched my Patreon page back in 2016. It was a weird year for me professionally, and the Patreon campaign helped bridge an income gap while I figured out what to do next while I was rewriting No Frills Magento Layout for the recently released Magento 2 (still for sale!). I’m extraordinarily [...]
astormA small “what is your salary” thread from reddit crossed my desk the other day and these are always worth a link. I see a range of $180,000 USD a year at the top to $2,016 USD a year at the bottom (not a typo). Globalization is a hell of a drug, and the domain, type-of-business you’re programming for, and geographic [...]
astormOne of my first Go projects involved taking a bunch of JSON test fixtures and feeding them to the APIs we’d built. Another team created these fixtures in order to provide expected inputs and outputs to an API with implementations across a number of different languages. JSON is always tricky in a typed language — it’s a [...]
astormThe closest parallel to the current “Magento 2 might fork” situation I can think of is the SugarCRM/SuiteCRM split. SugarCRM started life as an open source, self-installed PHP based customer relationship management system. It was one of the many PHP systems that was easy to bucket under the “C.R.U.D. line-of-business [...]
astormIt’s been clear that the relationship between “the Magento Inc. spun out of eBay and purchased by Adobe” and its open source community has been strained for a long time. While there were individuals inside the company who tried to nurture and maintain this relationship, the software engineering that Magento Inc. did [...]
astormI’ve got one last WordPress post in me for now. Today we’ll be taking a quick look at what WordPress’s “The Loop“™ and its related functions are actually doing behind the scenes. Per the docs, a basic The Loop™ loop looks like this if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); // Display post [...]
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