This morning I converted what I think are the last of my self hosted commercial SSL certs to Let’s Encrypt certs via Certbot. I still have reservations about so many certs going through a single provider and, more generally, the value of HTTPS everywhere, but saving money on certs is suddenly more pressing as I stare down [...]
astormIn languages like C and C++, most teaching approaches will have you think about creating variables in two distinct phases. First, you’ll declare the variable. int c; and then you’ll initialize the variable with its default value c = 42 When you declare the variable, you’ll telling the compiler what sort of value the [...]
astormI’ve been wondering lately about the future of languages like ruby, python, PHP, and (to a lesser extent) Node.js. These are languages that launched in the 1990s (except for Node.js) and were adopted widely despite not having a large vendor behind them. The development, maintenance, and promotion of Java and .NET are backed by [...]
astormOver the past year Amazon’s been sending me a series of escalating emails warning me that it’s shutting off my SES access unless I something something V4 authentication signature. Sometime in April they followed through and stopped letting me use the API. It was time to dissect an old legacy app and figure out what, if [...]
astormThis entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Shopware's Development Environment. Earlier posts include Composer Path Repositories, Shopware's psh.phar Command Line Tool, Shopware: Code that's theirs, Code that's yours, and Composer vs. History. This is the most recent post in the series. I didn’t intend to write a four article series on [...]
astormThis entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Shopware's Development Environment. Earlier posts include Composer Path Repositories, Shopware's psh.phar Command Line Tool, and Shopware: Code that's theirs, Code that's yours. Later posts include Wrap Up on "Shopware's Development Environment". Composer has been a boon for anyone working with [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Shopware's Development Environment. Earlier posts include Composer Path Repositories, and Shopware's psh.phar Command Line Tool. Later posts include Composer vs. History, and Wrap Up on "Shopware's Development Environment". Most PHP Programming frameworks (and, by extension, PHP CMS systems) have a [...]
astormThis entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Shopware's Development Environment. Earlier posts include Composer Path Repositories. Later posts include Shopware: Code that's theirs, Code that's yours, Composer vs. History, and Wrap Up on "Shopware's Development Environment". Most software projects of any significant size start to accumulate [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Shopware's Development Environment. Later posts include Shopware's psh.phar Command Line Tool, Shopware: Code that's theirs, Code that's yours, Composer vs. History, and Wrap Up on "Shopware's Development Environment". By default, when you run $ composer require some/package Composer will ask [...]
astormOne of my favorite features of PHP is the strtotime function. This function lets you pass in a date string and have a unix timestamp returned $time = strtotime('2021-04-01'); echo date('c',$time),"\n"; // outputs // 2021-04-01T00:00:00-07:00 What’s great about it is it works with a variety of date formats. $time = [...]
astormI’ve been dabbling with React.js again and trying to understand what isn’t clicking for me with this popular frontend framework. Consider this some messy out loud thinking about React’s useEffect hook. What is useEffect? The useEffect function is a React Hook. React Hooks only work with functional components. That is to [...]
astormSome folks in my old Magento cohort have been spending time looking into the venerable open source Shopware ecommerce platform. I remember kicking Shopware’s tires a few years back and found the technology both comprehensive and — boring. Good for Shopware, but not ideal for someone who differentiates on technology. [...]
astormAn older article from Ars Technia on running your own email server/service. I have a distinct memory of looking into how all this worked back in the late 90s or early 00s (the memory’s distinct, the timeline isn’t) and being stymied by the complexity as some old Times New Roman text and a grey background started talking about [...]
astormFile under “link blog as bookmarks” — Retool looks like a full Visual Studio (not Visual Studio Code) style IDE fo building simple database based application. I’m pretty sure every information systems engineer has thought about building something like this at some point.
astormA career in programming involves endless cycles of professional development/retraining. Lately I’ve been working on a hobby project that involves some React. It’s — different. Simple things seem hard and “understanding the magic” requires leaps that aren’t intuitive-to-me. It’s neither [...]
astormWith all the talk of PHP 8, JITs, and copy of a random feature Java’s had for years in PHP there’s a decreasing amount of resources for folks just who are learning PHP at the same time that they’re learning to program. Alena Holligan’s new article (possibly part of a series?) is a nice bit of counter programming [...]
astormNot exactly breaking news, but the other day I noticed ExpressionEngine’s core CMS project was relicensed with an OSL approved open source license (Apache 2) back in 2018, and that they released version 6.0 back in December of 2020. Also, if Wikipedia is living up to its reputation as the source of all truth, it sounds like the [...]
astormThe main reason I stay on Twitter? I have a large enough follower count that useful information still comes at me, but not so large a follower count that it’s an overwhelming sh—tshow. Lists and judicious blocking also help. Two additional useful bits of information came my way on practical steps for dealing with Unicode in [...]
astormIt looks like security researchers have noticed that open source software package repositories are sort of bad at package name resolution, and that it’s relatively easy to slip a shady package into the public dependency chain when folks are publishing code in the open that references private packages. So that’s me checking [...]
astormThis entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Text Encoding and Unicode. Earlier posts include Inspecting Bytes with Node.js Buffer Objects, Unicode vs. UTF-8, and When Good Unicode Encoding Goes Bad. This is the most recent post in the series. PHP’s unicode story is — not great. PHP’s strings don’t know anything about [...]
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