Back in they day, I ran a Tumblr blog named Magento Quickies where I’d post shorter, less in-depth posts about my travels through Magento’s source code. This Programming Quickies categories is the successor to that Tumblr blog. You’ll find all the old Magento Quickies content here, as well as new short posts about programming in general.
This section has its own RSS feed, the old Magento Quickies feed should should be redirecting, and we’re cross posting notifications for new posts over to magento-quickies.tumblr.com. In other words, you shouldn’t need to know any of this, but the duct tape that keeps the internet held together isn’t aging well, so your mileage may vary.
Below you'll find all the Programming Quickies articles on the site, followed by a chronological listing of the same. You may also browse the 7 series directly via the following links. Pestle, Four Steps to Async Iterators, Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020, Text Encoding and Unicode, Shopware's Development Environment, A Sentimental Gen-X Programmer Culls his Tech Books, and, Containers, Containers, Containers.
This 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 [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Text Encoding and Unicode. Earlier posts include Inspecting Bytes with Node.js Buffer Objects, and Unicode vs. UTF-8. Later posts include PHP and Unicode. So why am I posting so much about unicode and the word Hyvä? That’s a long story. Whenever I work on a longer piece of writing, part of my [...]
astormThis entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Text Encoding and Unicode. Earlier posts include Inspecting Bytes with Node.js Buffer Objects. Later posts include When Good Unicode Encoding Goes Bad, and PHP and Unicode. In my last quick tips post I mentioned examining the bytes of a text file that contained the text Hyvä, and getting back the [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Text Encoding and Unicode. Later posts include Unicode vs. UTF-8, When Good Unicode Encoding Goes Bad, and PHP and Unicode. I’ve started to really enjoy Node.js’s Buffer object for byte level examination of files. For example — if you create a text file with a bit of unicode in it [...]
astormThis repository, from the lead maintainer of fastify, crossed my desk recently. It’s a full on example of how you might build a fastify based web service or application. Fastify is a server side web framework for Node.js. Beyond the obvious usefulness of a reference application, this is noteworthy (to me) because these sorts of [...]
astormContinuing my twenty year flirtation with maybe I should do a little python — I’ve started listening to the Talk Python with Me podcast, mainly on the strength of two recent episodes. The first is an interview with Simon Willison where he talked about the early days of Django, and then about his more recent invention, [...]
astormI noticed my twitter auto-poster stopped working, so I dug up my old IFTTT password, logged in, was greeted by this and sighed. “A Problem”. Half the sigh was wondering how anyone thought this sort of error message was useful, and the other half coming from knowing exactly how this sort of error message happens. So this post [...]
astormSo here’s one story to tell about the recent announcement that CentOS Stream will become the only CentOS. I’m not deep in these particular communities — most of this is just things I’ve picked up over the years and some light googling. The Story In the beginning — around the year 2000 — an enterprise [...]
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