Pragmatism in the real world
Brent Simmons has recently posted How Not to Crash #9: Mindset: I used to think that means I should write code that’s about 80% as clever as I am. Save a little bit for debugging. But over the years I’ve come to think that I should write code that’s about 10% as clever as I am. And I’ve come to believe that true cleverness is in making code so clear and obvious that it looks… continue reading.
Today marks 20 years since PHP was released by Rasmus Lerdorf and Ben has been asking for how we started our PHP journey. My first use of PHP was to write a website for an online computer gaming guild for EverQuest, back in 1999. A friend recommended it when I asked him how people programmed webpages in something other the C! That first website is still going and I'm not proud of the code. I'm… continue reading.
With the release of Xdebug 2.3, I have updated my xdebug php.ini settings, so it seems sensible to write them down where I won't lose them! The new-for-2.3 features which prompted this are xdebug.overload_var_dump, which Derick has written about and xdebug.halt_level which I have previously written about. I find both of these very useful. This is my current php.ini configuration: ; Xdebug settings ; var_dump() displays everything, including filename and line number xdebug.overload_var_dump = 2… continue reading.
As I keep looking this up in other projects that I've written, I'm putting it here so I can find it more easily. There are a number of built-in PHP functions that generate a notice or warning that you can't turn off when something goes wrong, such as parse_ini_file and file_get_contents. One common solution to this is to suppress using the @ operator: $result = @file_get_contents($url); if (false === $result) { // inspect error_get_last() to… continue reading.
Warning Slim 3 is currently under active development. Expect BC breaks! I'm creating a number of projects in Slim 3 (which is currently under development) at the moment in order test things out and found that I was setting them up in essentially the same way. To save me having to do this each time, I've now created a skeleton project that is set up with the directory structure that I like and also includes… continue reading.
Wikipedia defines a role model like this: A role model is a person whose behavior, example, or success is or can be emulated by others All my life, I have identified people that I perceive to be a little better than I am in some facet of life that I want to get better at and I emulate them. I've been doing this all my life. They have been my role models. My first recollection… continue reading.
I currently use rst2pdf to create presentations slide decks from reStructured Text files. I like rST a lot as it's more expressive than Markdown and allows for extension. Tables in rST are marked up like this: +———–+———–+———–+ | Heading 1 | Heading 2 | Heading 3 | +===========+===========+===========+ | a | b | c | | | | | | aa | | | +———–+———–+———–+ | d | e | f | +———–+———–+———–+ | g… continue reading.
In Zend Framework 2, if you define your input filter via configuration, then you can override validation messages using a format along the lines of: <validators> <notEmpty> <messages> <isEmpty>Please provide your telephone number</isEmpty> </messages> </notEmpty> </validators> Setting the message is easy enough, once you have the correct key name. This is a list of all the keys for the standard validators: Validator Key name Default message Alnum alnumInvalid Invalid type given. String, integer or float… continue reading.
Sometimes you need more configuration flexibility for your application than a single array. In these situations, I use the Zend\Config component which I install via composer: composer require "zendframework/zend-config" This will install the Zend\Config component, along with its dependency Zend\Stdlib. Let's look at a couple of common situations. Multiple files It can be useful to to split your settings files out for administrative or environment-specific reasons. To set up within a Slim application, you do… continue reading.
I'm still using Ansible to provision Vagrant VMs. This is how I added the XHGui profiler to my standard setup. Theres a number steps we need to do: Install Composer Install the uprofiler PHP extension Install XHGui Set up for profiling Set up host for XHGui website Install Composer Installing Composer requires these tasks: – name: Install Composer shell: curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php — –install-dir=/usr/local/bin creates=/usr/local/bin/composer – name: Rename composer.phar to composer shell: mv… continue reading.
