Two of the biggest mind shifts I’ve had to make in coming back to C programming have been strings and variable scope/lifetime. This Stack Overflow question is a nice encasulation of both. First off — strings aren’t a first class type in C. They’re just a char array of individual characters, with a NULL character as the final [...]
astormIn Magento 1, it was pretty common to write a bit of layout update XML that looked like the following. <reference name="head"> <action method="setLabel"> <label>skin_js</label> </action> </reference> This XML translates roughly into the following PHP pseudo code $block = $layout->getBlock('head'); [...]
astormOne of the bigger changes to Magento 2’s layout system is how a end-user-programmer uses layout handles. In Magento 1, layout handles were top level configuration nodes in a set of layout update xml files <handle_name> <!-- layout update xml nodes --> </handle_name> In Magento 2, layout handles are individual XML [...]
astormMagento 2 introduced a new node type to its Layout XML DSL — the <arguments/> and <argument/> node. #File: vendor/magento/module-shipping/view/frontend/layout/sales_guest_view.xml <referenceBlock name="sales.order.view"> <block class="Magento\Shipping\Block\Tracking\Link" name="tracking-info-link" [...]
astormThis in an interesting Magento layout technique that came my way via Vinai Kopp (of Mage2.tv fame). Magento 2’s automatic constructor dependency injection system presents a problem for class trees with multiple levels of inheritance. First, programmers end up needing to call parent constructors with the right arguments, and in the [...]
astormDebugging cron jobs is one of my least favorite activities. This clever tip over on Stack Overflow shows how to use cron and the env generate the enviornmental variable your system’s cron runs under, which in turn will let you pretend to be the cron job. (This won’t help you if you’re using a PHP system that layers its [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Just Enough C for PHP. Earlier posts include Just Enough C for PHP, and Just Enough C for PHP: Running C Programs. Later posts include Just Enough C for PHP: C Macros, There's no Such Thing as PHP, and Just Enough C for PHP: Make Basics. Today’s episode of Just Enough C for PHP is light on [...]
astormOne long time resident of my ~/bin folder is lns lns — a friendly program for making symbolic links For whatever reason I’ve never been able to get the argument order to ln -s memorized. The lns perl script (which has always run out of the box on system provided perl without issue) make it so I never need to. Whether you lns [...]
astormSpeaking of composer and sematnic versioning, here’s a neat web page that will List all the avaiable versions of a particular packagist package Highlight which versions composer will pick when you use a particular set of SemVer characters Useful when you’re chasing down composer dependencies — although this project (as [...]
astormI checked some code into pestle (my PHP command-line framework and Magento 2 code generation tool) for the first time in a bit, and was greeted with a broken travis build (for PHP 5.6). Digging into the problem, I saw a sight that’s become increasingly familiar to PHP developers in recent years $ composer install Loading composer [...]
astormWhile Laravel’s a fantastic framework, I don’t think anyone would ascribe Plays Well with Others as a core tennant of the project. i.e. Using individual Laravel components like the Eloquent ORM in your own projects is never a straight forward affair. They’re just not designed for that use case. This makes projects like [...]
astormOn of my work hobbies is finding a way to replace Dominant Accounting Software package in my life, and because I’m a programmer (and a little weird) that means writing one off applications to repace the functionality of Dominant Accounting Software package. This is why today’s links are the wikipedia PostScript page and [...]
astormGNU Make is the original build system and, strange modern outliers asside, is mostly used (and useful) in C or C++ based projects. It’s syntax reflects 40+ years of — organic? — growth, and I was happy to discover this free O’Reilly book that grounds you in the fundamental concepts.
astormMagento developer of note Daniel Sloof recently tweeted about the open sourcing (MIT) of — his? his company’s — Magento 2 Clean Checkout extension Breaking a couple months silence to bring you guys an early christmas gift: https://t.co/dIi6J9mLx0 A drop-in replacement for #Magento2 Checkout. Commercial project turned [...]
astormComing at C from a “test legacy code first” point of view is tricky. All those neat test framework features for testing code not written under test (i.e. mocks, etc.) rely on a language’s dynamic nature for implementation details. You don’t get that easily in C, so it was a pleasure to be introduced to the cmocka framework. [...]
astormI’m not sure if the talks (i.e. videos) from the recent MageTestFest conference will show up online, but these slides from Vinai Kopp are worth a link, if only because they capture most of the weird, non-obvious incantations you’ll need to run Magento 2’s unit and integration tests.
astormYou can’t walk ten steps in this businesses without hearing Engineering is a set of tradeoffs. You rarely hear the other side of that: and sometimes we make the wrong tradeoffs which lead to living with garbage behavior for years. PHP leaks memory like a sieve. By leak we mean during a long running PHP request the amount of memory [...]
astormCampaigning season’s winding down, which means conference season is upon us. Two years after release, Magento’s XML/PHP/HTML/Javascript/KnockoutJS based UI Component System continues to be a topic of regular dissection and drubbing. At the recent Mage Titans conference in Manchester Maria Kern gave a well regarded talk on [...]
astormThis one came out of a conversation in my Patreon mentoring Slack room. Someone was having trouble with their Magento 2 object manager configurations (di.xml) not showing up — but only during checkout. Their problem? They were dropping their di.xml files into the frontend folder etc/frontend/di.xml This is good enough to get class [...]
astormMy career’s headed down the other end of the Stack these days, so caveat-ihaventusedit-emptor, but based on pedigre alone this WordPress+React starter kit seems worth checking out.
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