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 isn’t new news but it was new to me. “Modern” macs have a security feature called “Full Disk Access” which sits on top of your computer’s normal security systems and prevents programs from accessing certain files/resources. This is good — but apparently something about the protections of [...]
astormThis website is hosted as simple static files, but it’s managed via a private WordPress instance that runs from my personal computer. I’m in the middle of retiring my circa 2014 laptop for a new M1 Mac mini and migrating this WordPress system was — about as rough as I expected. What follows are some random notes in case [...]
astormI recently bought one of the new M1 Macs to replace my aging laptop, and with it came MacOS 11 Big Sur. There’s lots of foundational shifting things happening with Apple’s computers there days — one of those is the official deprecation of programming runtimes that have been shipping with OS X since its earliest days. [...]
astormMy internets brought me this boring looking syllabus for a MacEwan University course on the unix command line. The course itself looks both useful and practical, but what piqued my interest was the slides from the first three lectures contain one of the most concise-yet-digestible descriptions of the long history of unix variants [...]
astormI just pushed the big red button on the 2.3.5 release of Commerce Bug. This is a small bug fix release that allows Commerce Bug to run in Magento systems that have opted to remove the RequireJS library. Commerce Bug doesn’t rely on RequireJS for any core functionality — even back in 2015 I was wary enough of the new [...]
astormIn a rare bit of “spam that was useful”, Perforce (who I guess own the Zend brand now?) published/publicized a white paper on how to get started with PHP Extension development. I don’t think there’s anything in here that isn’t up on the PHP Internals Book website or in the long out of print Extending and [...]
astormA quick primer (from curl’s most well known maintainer) on requesting websites from servers before you’ve officially changed their DNS entries. A quick TL;DR; if you’re conserving mouse clicks For non-SSL/HTTPS sites it’s as simple as changing the HOST header — curl --header "Host: example.com" [...]
astormIf you had trouble starting applications or saw a lot of “beach-balling” on your Mac last week it’s almost certain that Apple’s OCSP service was to blame. This article from Jeff Johnson (an independent Mac and iOS developer) gives a good high level overview of the problem before jumping into some equally good deep [...]
astormA small bug fix release for everyone’s my favorite Magento 2 code generation tool and ad-hoc PHP module system. This fixes a small bug in the magento2:generate:schema-add-column command that only triggered when using pestle’s interactive mode. This bug, although small, was interesting to the software builder in me for a a few [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020. Earlier posts include Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020, and Composer Plugins and Installers. This is the most recent post in the series. Magento 1 was one of the last big PHP platforms that didn’t embrace composer as a distribution model [...]
astormThis entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020. Earlier posts include Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020. Later posts include Installing OpenMage: Bridging a Generational Gap. I’m planning to take a look at options for installing OpenMage — but before we do that we need to do a [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Checking in on OpenMage and Magento in 2020. Later posts include Composer Plugins and Installers, and Installing OpenMage: Bridging a Generational Gap. After years of a sliding deadline, Adobe finally followed through on putting Magento 1 through their “end of life” process. My [...]
astormAfter over a decade on the 2010 version of Square Space I decided it was time to migrate my company’s tiny little website over to the new version of Square Space — the hegemony of black text on a white background comes for us all. Hats off to Square Space for keeping the old platform around for for commoditizing the bespoke [...]
astormAfter three years at the day job I’ve been granted access to a physical escape key. I prefer a “build everything back by hand” approach to setting up a new laptop, and this includes pulling over two locally run PHP applications I use to automate my job. One’s a WordPress P2 instance I use to log my daily work, the [...]
astormI’ve had these three free videos on my watch list for a while now. In twenty one minutes Chris Fidao runs you through the basic things you’ll want to do whenever you spin up a new VM somewhere. The videos cover setting up a non-root ssh user, locking down who can log in via SSH and forcing those same people to use SSH keys [...]
astormI’m finding the various Rust guides well written — or perhaps just well written for me. This bit in the Cargo Guide (Rust’s package manager and build tool) on Cargo.lock files was particularly succinct. If you’re building a non-end product, such as a rust library that other rust packages will depend on, put Cargo.lock [...]
astormThis entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Four Steps to Async Iterators. Earlier posts include ES6 Symbols, Javascript Generators, and ES6's Many for Loops and Iterable Objects. This is the most recent post in the series. Generator functions predate the introduction of async/await in javascript, which means that while creating an [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Four Steps to Async Iterators. Earlier posts include ES6 Symbols, and Javascript Generators. Later posts include Async Generators and Async Iteration in Node.js. Today we’ve got another remedial-for-me dive into modern javascript practices. Specifically, we’ll be looking at the for ... [...]
astormThis entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Four Steps to Async Iterators. Earlier posts include ES6 Symbols. Later posts include ES6's Many for Loops and Iterable Objects, and Async Generators and Async Iteration in Node.js. Generators are weird. They make programs behave in ways that are non-obvious. This weirdness easily turns into [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Four Steps to Async Iterators. Later posts include Javascript Generators, ES6's Many for Loops and Iterable Objects, and Async Generators and Async Iteration in Node.js. One pattern that keeps coming up when I’m spelunking older NPM packages for Node.js is using Symbols to define properties [...]
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