Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

MySQL 8 is coming

OpenSource.com covers the upcoming release of the MySQL 8.

What happened to 6 & 7?

Years ago, before the Sun Microsystems purchase of MySQL AB, there was a version of MySQL with the number 6. Sadly, it was a bit ambitious and the change of ownership left it to wither. The MySQL Cluster product has been using the 7 series for years. With the new changes for MySQL 8, developers feel they have modified it enough to bump the big number.

The new version brings a whole lot of changes to filesystem organization, indexes, faster ALTER TABLE, and more.

GitHub pricing : Business

GitHub has yet another update to their pricing options.  Business plans have been launched with support for SAML single sign-on, 99.95% uptime SLA, 24×5 support with 8 hour response, and more.

Unfortunately it still counts external contributors as users in the account, which makes it too expensive for my organizations, but it’s good to see them trying.

Moving files with commit history from one git repository to another

I’ve searched for this before, and I’m sure I’ll do that again (although the need is not that frequent), so here it goes.  It is possible to move files from one git repository to another, preserving commit history.  The following links provide a few examples of how to do this:

Basically, you need git filter-branch command, usually with the –subdirectory-filter parameter.

An example of where it is useful would be the extraction of some code from a project you have into a shared library or a simple plugin.

Modular CSS : Block, Element, Modifier

I don’t do a lot of front-end work these days, but I am genuinely interested in approaches that help build modular systems, especially when the subject is something as messy and as context-dependent as CSS.

Recently, I came across the Block-Element-Modifier approach, aka BEM, which I find interesting.

If you’re not familiar with BEM, it’s a naming methodology that provides a rather strict way to arrange CSS classes into independent components. It stands for Block Element Modifier and a common one looks like this:

.block {}
.block__element {}
.block--modifier {}
.block__element--modifier {}

The principles are simple — a Block represents an object (a person, a login form, a menu), an Element is a component within the block that performs a particular function (a hand, a login button, a menu item) and a Modifier is how we represent the variations of a block or an element (a female person, a condensed login form with hidden labels, a menu modified to look differently in the context of a footer).

This follow-up article provides more details and examples.

Composer require inline alias

Here’s a feature of composer that I didn’t know about until a few days ago – require inline alias.  Here’s the example from the documentation:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/you/monolog"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "symfony/monolog-bundle": "2.0",
        "monolog/monolog": "dev-bugfix as 1.0.x-dev"
    }
}

This is super useful when you have dependencies in your project that require a particular version of a third-party library or plugin, and you want to try a branch of that library or plugin. Switching to the branch alias doesn’t solve the problem, as everything that has version constraints on that requirement, will complain. With inline alias, you can alias a particular branch of the dependency as a particular version.

With inline alias, composer will fetch the branch that you want, but will assume that that branch works as a particular version that you specify, and thus satisfy all the other dependencies that require that particular version.

In my particular case, I was working on the CakePHP-based application, which was using a few CakePHP plugins (installed via composer).  Those plugins require CakePHP v3+.  I wanted to test a branch of CakePHP which had a particular fix I was interested in, but without disabling all the plugins.  Switching my application’s composer to require a branch dissatisfied all the plugins, as now composer didn’t know if the branch that I am requiring is of the CakePHP v3 or not.  Aliasing the branch to v3.4.1 (current stable version at the time) worked like a charm.