Pragmatism in the real world
I find myself needing to take screen captures of the currently active window in OS X reasonably frequently. The built-in way to do this on a Mac is to use shift+cmd+4, then press space and then use your mouse to highlight the window and click. For a good proportion of the time, I'm not using a mouse, so this doesn't work great. There's a built-in command line utility called screencapture which requires you to know… continue reading.
Regardless of which language you use, there are always configuration settings that need to be handled. One of the tenets of twelve factor app is that config should be stored in the environment. This is easy enough on the command line or in the config of our preferred hosting solution. When developing locally without a VM however it gets a little more complicated as we may need the same environment variable set to different values… continue reading.
Release process for Slim so that I don't forget any steps; based on a check list created by Asgrim. I should probably automate some of this! Preparation: Ensure all merged PRs have been associated to the tag we're about to release.Find them via this search: [is:pr is:closed no:milestone is:merged]. Close the milestone on GitHub. Create a new milestone for the next patch release. Ensure that you have the latest master & that your index is… continue reading.
Currently, I create presentations using rst2pdf and so I regularly have vim open side by side with the Preview app showing the rendered PDF. I use a Makefile to create the PDF from the rst sources, so I just use :make in vim to rebuild the PDF file and then had to switch to Preview in order for it to reload the updated PDF file. Recently a friend wondered why the PDF viewer couldn't reload… continue reading.
It seems to me that error handling is an afterthought in far too many APIs. When designing an API, I implore you to design your error handling too! The way that your API presents an error is key to a good API; developers integrating with your API will judge you on it. Follow the HTTP rules Just because it's an error doesn't mean that you can forget your HTTP. You need to be a great… continue reading.
Since, I last wrote about using the Doctrine project's Migrations tool independently of Doctrine's ORM, it's now stable and much easier to get going with. Installation and configuration As with all good PHP tools, we simply use Composer: $ composer require –dev doctrine/migrations This will install the tool and a script is placed into vendor/bin/doctrine-migrations. To configure, we need to add two files to the root of our project: migrations.yml: name: Migrations migrations_namespace: Migrations table_name:… continue reading.
I always seems to end up in vim sooner or later and I use Tim Pope's excellent Effortless Ctags with Git process to keep my ctags file up to date for my projects. As I'm now coding in Swift too, I needed ctags to support Swift. This is what I've added to my .ctags file: –langdef=Swift –langmap=Swift:+.swift –regex-swift=/(var|let)[ \t]+([^:=]+).*$/\2/,variable/ –regex-swift=/func[ \t]+([^\(\)]+)\([^\(\)]*\)/\1/,function/ –regex-swift=/class[ \t]+([^:\{]+).*$/\1/,class/ –regex-swift=/protocol[ \t]+([^:\{]+).*$/\1/,protocol/ Any improvements, welcome! vim.swift As I'm writing about Swift and… continue reading.
There are three main variables when setting up a project with a client: price, scope and time. The more flexibility we have here, the easier it is to run an agile project. This is especially true when the scope is not fixed as agile development techniques really start to come into their own. Short development cycles of small, minimal, features allow the client to see the progress of the project earlier and so direct the… continue reading.
It's been a while since I could use a trackpad without pain and even longer since I could use a mouse or trackball. Currently I use a Wacom tablet as my mouse which works really well as long as I don't use it too much. Fortunately, keyboard usage doesn't seem to be a problem (yet?), so I try to use only the keyboard as much as possible on macOS (née OS X). These are some… continue reading.
I recently had some trouble with verifying an SSL in PHP on a client's server that I couldn't reproduce anywhere else. It eventually turned out that the client's IT department was presenting a different SSL certificate to the one served by the website. To help me diagnose this, I used this command line script to display the SSL certificate: getcert.sh #!/bin/bash echo | openssl s_client -showcerts -servername !$ -connect $1:443 2>/dev/null \ | openssl x509… continue reading.
