Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different

In “Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different” Carlos Nuñez advocates for the use of specialized infrastructure provisioning tools, like Terraform, Heat, and CloudFormation, instead of relying on the configuration management tools, like Ansible or Puppet.

I agree with his argument for the rollbacks, but not so much for the maintaining state and complexity.  However I’m not yet comfortable to word my disagreement – my head is all over the place with clouds, and I’m still weak on the terminology.

The article is nice regardless, and made me look at the provisioning tools once again.

World’s Biggest Data Breaches

Here’s an interactive collection of the world’s biggest data breaches.  It goes back to 2004, where about 92,000,000 email addresses and screen names were stolen by an AOL employee, and covers most of the major events up until and including 2016.  There are a few ways to filter the data and change the representation.

Overall, should give you a pretty good idea of how safe and secure your online data is. Oh, and how private it is too.

WordPress Plugin : Image Processing Queue

As described in “Introducing WP Image Processing Queue – On‑the‑Fly Image Processing Done Right“, Image Processing Queue plugin tries to solve several issues with On-The-Fly Image Processing (OTFIP) in WordPress.  Some of the things that it improves are:

  • Response times for pages with non-yet generated thumbnails.
  • Server CPU spikes for pages which use a lot of images on sites with a lot of configured thumbnail sizes (49? really? WOW! I don’t think I’ve seen more than 10 in the wild, which is still a lot).
  • Server disk space issues caused by removed images and leftover thumbnails.

This is a very useful direction and I hope all the necessary bits will make it into the WordPress core.  But even for those who don’t use WordPress, the whole discussion and implementation are a handy reference.

PHPUnit Snapshot Assertions – a way to test without writing actual test cases

phpunit-snapshot-assertions – is an interesting addition to the PHPUnit assertions which allows testing against previously created snapshots.  This is particularly useful for testing the outputs of API end-points, format conversion functions, and the like.  Instead of testing the actual functionality, these assertions allow to compare the output of the current test run with the known good output of a previously created snapshot.

This works well for generic text, but even better for widely used formats like JSON and XML, where, in case of a failed assertion, a meaningful difference can be provided.

Here is a blog post providing some more details on philosophy and methodology.

Charles – web debugging proxy application

Charles is a web debugging proxy application for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.  Here’s a quick description from the project’s website:

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

And here are some key features:

  • SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text
  • Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency
  • AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text
  • AMF – view the contents of Flash Remoting / Flex Remoting messages as a tree
  • Repeat requests to test back-end changes
  • Edit requests to test different inputs
  • Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses
  • Validate recorded HTML, CSS and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator

Pretty much every browser these days comes with developer tools (like Google Chrome, for example).

But these are mostly useful for requests made by the browser itself.  Often, like depicted in “PHP and cURL: How WordPress makes HTTP requests” blog post from which I learned about Charles, one needs to examine requests made by the application itself – like WordPress in this particular case.

The developer tools of the browser won’t be very useful, but a proxy application like Charles would.  Setting up a proxy will send all requests through it, allowing for easy inspection and debugging.