Month: April 2016

Common files in PHP packages

Jordi Boggiano looks at some common files in PHP packages, using Packagist as a data source.  There are some interesting metrics in there.  For example:

  • 58% of packages include a src/ directory and 5% a lib/ one. That’s surprisingly low to me, that means a lot have the code simply in the root folder.
  • 4% have a bin/ directory, including some sort of CLI executables.
  • 55% have a LICENSE file, that’s.. pretty disastrous but hopefully a lot of those that don’t at least indicate in the README and composer.json
  • 49% have some file or directory indicating the presence of tests (phpunit.xml & co). I am not sure if this is good or bad news to be honest, that depends on your expectations.

Bad project

CommitStrip nails one of the ways of getting into a bad project …

bad project

I remember reading an interview with Matt Mullenweg (though can’t seem to find a reference now), where he said that this sort of thing happened with Automattic.  People were asking them for commercial support, but they didn’t want to do it, so they started with an insane amount of like $5,000 per month and all of a sudden found themselves with a queue of people outside.

And they were not alone, of course.

How fast has computing become?

Jeff Atwood has an excellent blog post, about the increase in computing powers of the modern CPUs and GPUs and the affects of those on things around us.  In particular – games such as chess and Go, and password cracking.

Every time you see a new video card release, don’t think “slightly nicer looking games” think “wow, hash cracking and AI just got 2× faster … again!”

Fascinating read!