Developing software in the Real World
This interesting tweet by Clare Liguori came to my attention last week: This new img2lambda tool will take the layers of a Docker container and convert them to AWS layers for use in Lambda. I poked around with Clare's example and updated my lambda-php project in order to understand how it works. I also rewrote my runtime's bootstrap to make it clearer. The clever thing from my point of view is that you can build… continue reading.
Today marks a momentous day! I've released 0.94 of rst2pdf to PyPI! If you have a need to convert plain text files to PDF, check it out. As the last release, 0.93, was December 2012, I think you could have reasonably assumed that the project was abandoned. So why did I bring it back from the dead?
For a little website that I'm writing, I thought that I'd use IBM Cloud Object Storage (equivalent to AWS S3) as I'm generating the pages using OpenWhisk on IBM Cloud Functions. The documentation is quite good if you want to use the website, but is a bit spread all over the place if you're using the command line, which is how I do things. As Cloud Object Storage is a bit of a mouthful, I'll… continue reading.
I use Apple's Reminders app to remind me about things that I need to do. It has the useful feature of syncing across my Mac, iPad and iPhone and I can add to it via Siri in my car. When I am notified on my Mac, a notification alert appears with two buttons: Complete and Later. Clicking Later offers a set of options to dismiss the alert and have it reappear in 5 minutes, in… continue reading.
Like, Simon Wardley, I think that serverless computing is an interesting space because the billing is granular (pay only when your code executes) and you don't need to worry about maintaining and provisioning servers or containers. So much so, that I maintain the Open Source PHP Runtime for Apache OpenWhisk which is available commercially as IBM Cloud Functions There are other serverless providers, and AWS Lambda is the market leader, but until recently PHP support… continue reading.
As 2018 draws to a close, I take the time to look at the past year as I have done in years past, I look at the photos that I've taken and reminisce about all that I've done this year. January I started the year with ongoing efforts to reduce the pain in my joints and then visited America for CodeMash in Ohio. This was my second consecutive year speaking at CodeMash and I really… continue reading.
One of my favourite command line utilities is autojump. It's a small command line utility that allows you to change directory without having to remember exactly where that directory is. For example, to start working on OpenWhisk, I simply type:
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j openw |
And the current directory is changed to /Users/rob/Projects/openwhisk/incuator-openwhisk for me. This is much easier than typing cd ~/Pro{tab}op{tab}in{return}! Biasing towards a particular directory When you have a directory that's a common one that you… continue reading.
Incredibly, macOS Mojave comes with Bash 3.22 by default still. Apparently this is due to licensing reasons, however Bash 4 has lots of lovely features including associative arrays that I'd like use. Hence, after reading the Internet for a bit, I've installed it on my Mac. This turned out to require just 3 commands:
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$ brew install bash $ sudo bash -c 'echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /etc/shells' $ chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash |
Close the terminal and open a new one which now has Bash 4! Using Bash 4 in scripts Any script… continue reading.
A friend emailed me recently asking about route specific configuration in Slim. He wants to be able to set properties when creating the route that he can pick up when the route is matched. The way to do this is using route arguments. I've written about route arguments before in the context of setting default values for a route parameter, but you can also use them to set new data for use later. In this… continue reading.
I've recently been updating a website that was written a long time ago that has not been touched in a meaningful way in many years. In addition to the actual work I was asked to do, I took the opportunity to update the password hashing routines. This site is so old that the passwords are stored using MD5 hashes and that's not really good enough today, so I included updating to bcrypt hashing with password_hash()… continue reading.
Rob Allen is a PHP and Zend Framework expert based in Worcester, UK. He runs Nineteen Feet, is the author of Zend Framework in Action.
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