Pragmatism in the real world
I've had a few cases recently when I wanted to know the number of words that I had written. To do this, I've copied the text to BBEdit which displays the word count in its status bar, but this is a bit of a faff. I finally sat down and created a Shortcut for it that took 10 mins. This is the shortcut: The idea is that I want to select the text and run… continue reading.
On one of my servers here, I run a local Perforce P4 server for my son. He's a game developer and as they use P4 at work, he wanted to learn it in a sandbox and to have somewhere familiar to put his own work. Installation onto Ubuntu was easy enough and I provided access outside of our local network via Tailscale and all was well. Recently, I was doing some admin-stuff on the server… continue reading.
Earlier this year, Lorna spent some time updating rst2pdf's website to use Sphinx. The nice thing about Sphinx is that it uses restructuredText, the same as rst2pdf does, so we now stay in the same ecosystem. While, we could have continued using Jekyll, it makes much more sense for us to use the same markup language as we use for the main tool, and our manual is written in it too. With the Jekyll system,… continue reading.
When writing an OpenAPI specification, I came across the need for a particular property in an error response to be either a string or an object. This situation came about when validating a POST request that takes an items property that is a list of objects As a contrived example of a pet with accessories, consider this example request in curl: curl -X "POST" "http://api.example.com/pets" \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d $'{ "name": "Rover", "items": [… continue reading.
On the Roave Discord recently, there was a discussion about not breaking BC in interfaces inspired by this post by Jérôme Tamarelle: It's clearly true that if you add a new parameter to a method on an interface, then that's a BC break as every concrete implementation of the interface needs to change their signature. However, Gina commented that you don't need to use func_get_arg() as concrete implementations can add additional optional arguments. WHAT?!!! I… continue reading.
While it would be nice to put the genie back in the bottle, that hasn't happened often in human history, so for the foreseeable future, AI in the form of LLMs are here to stay. I imagine that what we use them for will change over time as we collectively internalise their limitations. Personally, I'm now using them for my work as much as I reasonably can. This is involving many different areas, such as… continue reading.
To provide consistency between the environments of our developers, I'm a strong proponent of using containers so that every developer is using the same versions of our tools. This is really important for command line tooling that depends on a separately installed language such as NodeJS or PHP as a simple npm i -g can install wildly different versions if a dev is running an older (or newer!) version of Node. For OpenAPI specs, listing… continue reading.
One of the projects that I'm working on at the moment uses Stripe which means that we need to handle web hooks in order to ascertain what's happened as that's how Stripe communicates back to us. For production and staging, it's easy enough to register a url on Stripe's dashboard, but when developing, it's a little more complicated as our computers are generally isolated from receiving incoming web requests from the public internet, along with… continue reading.
With the release of macOS 18.4, Safari no longer shows a padlock when you visit a website that uses https. I assume there's a reason for this but I was scratching my head trying to work out how to view the SSL certificate when I went to a new-to-me website domain that my bank asked me to go to. This is what the address bar now looks like when you're on a secure connection to… continue reading.
With the recent release of the new OpenAI ChatGPT that can do image generation, I thought that I might add a feature image to my last blog post. I've had mixed experiences of AI generation of images, probably because I'm not good at prompting them. I started with this: We now have an image, but it doesn't have a credit. Now, I could go back to the LLM and ask it again, but these things… continue reading.
