Month: June 2015

My largest claim to fame in the Open Source software just got merged in – a pull request to the phinx project, adding support for MySQL’s LONGBLOB (as well as TINYBLOB and MEDIUMBLOB).  Phinx is the PHP tool for database migrations.  It’s used, among others, by the CakePHP 3 framework.

The patch itself was rather simple and I was surprised that it hasn’t been done by someone else earlier (there was an open issue requesting this for more than a year).  Phinx already had support for BLOB, and for TINYTEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, TEXT, and LONGTEXT.  So practically all I had to do was a bit of copy-paste and find-replace.  Gladly, there were some unit tests in place already, preventing me from breaking a thing or two.

What I found interesting though, wasn’t the patch itself, but the support of the CakePHP community (thank you guys!).   Every few days someone (even core CakePHP developers) would “thumbs up” the pull request to draw the attention of the maintainer to it.  Some people pulled the branch and tested it.  Some wrote comments.  That was awesome and quite inspiring!