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.
Last week I had the good fortune to visit Montreal and attend the Node+JS Interactive conference, 2019 edition. It’s nice being able to attend a conference anonymously without the expectations that would materialize whenever I attended Magento’s Image conference. These are just some quick high level thoughts on the talks I [...]
astormPossibly useful ten tweet overview of React. I touch React components occasionally but not often and find this a nice refresher of what’s going on with those sort-of-a-class files.
astormThere’s a new PHP remote code execution bug making the rounds, and I thought it might make for some blogging fodder, as it hits me right in my “intersection of deeply technical content + mushy culture stuff” feels. If you’re interested in learning more about this remote code execution bug, why it could effect more [...]
astormA new version of Pestle (1.5.0) has just been released. This is the big “generate code outside of app/code if you want” release — full docs for the new feature are also available. Download instructions are in the README.md, and current users should be able to update with a $ pestle.phar selfupdate The new feature is [...]
astormThe KnpLabs/php-github-api project was invaluable to me during my recent composer/Magento research. GitHub offers both REST and GraphQL APIs that you interact with via HTTP, but it’s often easier to use these sorts of APIs with a package that gives you classes or functions that handle the HTTP POSTing and serializing of the data. [...]
astormI’ve recently allowed my open source time to become monopolized by a bunch of data scraping and analysis. I managed to pull together around 3400 composer.json files for Magento modules hosted on packagist. My primary interest was in their autoloader section, but then I remembered Magento’s toying around with using [...]
astormI have soft spot for “non traditionally successful people telling you how they were successful even if it might not have specific repeatable advice because the world is neither kind nor fair but god damn it you’ve got to be kind“ confessionals, so I was pleased to see Why All Of Our Games Look Like Crap come across my [...]
astormIt’s hard to ignore React. Facebook and the adjacent React community have turned this open source project into one of the few UI Platforms that can address the entire market of browsers, computers, and mobile devices. You don’t need to use React, but if you ignore it you do so at your own peril. It’s an odd framework [...]
astormThis entry is part 9 of 12 in the series Pestle. Earlier posts include Pestle 1.1.1 Released, Pestle 1.1.2 Released, Magento 2 Setup Migration Scripts, Pestle 1.2.1 Released, Sending Text Messages with PHP, pestle, and Nexmo, Pestle 1.3 and AbstractModel UI Generation, Pestle 1.4.1 and the Merits of Inheritance, and Pestle 1.4.4 [...]
astormThis entry is part 8 of 12 in the series Pestle. Earlier posts include Pestle 1.1.1 Released, Pestle 1.1.2 Released, Magento 2 Setup Migration Scripts, Pestle 1.2.1 Released, Sending Text Messages with PHP, pestle, and Nexmo, Pestle 1.3 and AbstractModel UI Generation, and Pestle 1.4.1 and the Merits of Inheritance. Later posts include [...]
astormOld news to most, new news to me. Gdrive is a command line application written in go that lets you manage your google drive via the command line, including the ability to sync a local folder to your gdrive. Left to my own devices I’ve been a dropbox person for years, but if you’re working in an enviornment where [...]
astormOver the weekend I finished up phase 1 of my project to get better documentation around pestle, my home rolled command-line-framework/Magento 2 code generation tool. Four days ahead of schedule! I’ll be taking a small break to work on some other things, and then picking back with with the next phase, which is documenting pestle [...]
astormPutting aside my feelings on folks opting to distribute information via gists instead of their own websites, this gist from Andrew Levine does a great job summarizing the problems and challenges with efficiently distributing javascript via Magento 2’s standard systems. He includes some of the projects folks use to work around these [...]
astormI was minding my own business when the internet threw these old “Micro Adventure” books in my face, and I was hit with a flood of old memories. Pre “Hunger Games style” YA books, written in the second person, with basic programs interwoven into the ludicrous-to-adults adventure stories. That led me down the [...]
astormToday’s link comes via Process Eight, via my Patreon slack room. It’s slides from a old Magento 2 talk, made prior to the release of Magento 2. The talk itself seems to have been taken offline. The code generation the slides refers to is Magento’s automatic code generation that happens behind the scenes when you use a [...]
astormBack when I still had some hope Magento 2 would be the same sort of open-source-for-everyone platform that Magento 1 was, and I was working my way through writing the Magento 2 for PHP MVC Developers series, I was simultaneously developing pestle, my command line tool for generating Magento 2 modules. As time went on I realized the [...]
astormWhenever a company releases something that’s crazy expensive (like Apple’s new starting-at $6,000 MacPro, $5,000 monitor, and $1,000 monitor stand), I think of this almost 30 year old marketing strategy video from Steve Jobs recoded during his NeXT computer days. This was one of those of those random videos that changed how I [...]
astormThe Portland Business journal has a short story on the local (Portland, OR) Treehouse layoffs. This quote jumped out at me. However, [Ryan] Carson said the company has learned that the $25-a-month product is not “the most effective way to empower people to get jobs in tech in the future.” Which — doesn’t surprise [...]
astormOne of the challenges in learning PHP’s C based internal APIs is finding clear and clean examples to learn from. The C extensions that ship with PHP and pecl are old, often worked on over the years by multiple engineers with no single coding style, and contain all sorts of — let’s call it pragmatic and clever macro BS [...]
astormI’m working my way through the TypeScript manual and pleasantly surprised to find really good tech writing. So far it’s clearly written and follows the “introduce a concept, here’s some code to backup that concept, talk about the concept again to reenforce” pattern I prefer in my own writing. The tone also [...]
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