Year: 2016

Internet users in Cyprus

7 years ago, to the day, I’ve published this post, containing the Google screenshot for the graph of the Internet users in Cyprus.  It used to be 38% of the population.

Today I decided to check exactly the same Google query and see how that number has changed.  Here is how:

internet-users-in-cyprus

Yup.  We went from 38% to 65.5% in 7 years.  Considering the fact that the population grew as well, in the absolute numbers the statistics will be even more staggering.

Migrating to PHP 7

PHP 7.0.0 has been released for a year now.  I wasn’t in a rush to migrate to it, but with all the cool features and performance optimization, it’s definitely something I wanted to look into rather sooner than later.

It turns out that I’ve done my first PHP 7 migration a week ago, when I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 25.  Yup, that’s right.  It’s a bit embarrassing, but I have been developing on PHP 7 for a week without even noticing it.

$ php --version
PHP 7.0.13 (cli) (built: Nov 9 2016 07:29:28) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v2.4.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2016, by Derick Rethans

I think that was due to a few things:

  • It’s been quite a busy week, so my attention was all over the place.
  • PHP 7 backward compatibility is pretty awesome.  There are only a few things that need fixing in the older code bases, but if you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have nothing to change or worry about.
  • Most of the code I’m working on runs through TravisCI builds, which are executed on both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.  Since we had this for a while now, most, if not all, of our code is PHP 7 compatible.

The absolute lack of any issues for the last week, related to this upgrade, is encouraging.  Now I will probably try to upgrade our servers sooner than later.

With that, I’ll go back to the wonderful and exciting world of PHP, leaving you to decide whether I’m very serious or very sarcastic…

 

Things to avoid when writing application logs

DaedTech runs the blog post “Avoid these Things When Logging from Your Application“.  It sounds trivial, but it’s not.  There are quite a few good reminders for best logging practices.  Here’s the summary list:

  • Forgetting Context
  • Cryptic Codes
  • Spamming the Log File
  • Unsafe Logging Calls
  • Mixing Application Logic with Logging
  • Sensible Logging

Read the whole thing for examples and details.

Amazon Lightsail – virtual private servers made easy

Amazon announced a new service – Amazon Lightsail – virtual private servers made easy, starting at $5 per month.

pricing

This is basically a much simplified setup of a few of their services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EIP, Amazon AIM, Amazon EBS, Amazon Route 53, and a few others.  For those, who don’t want to figure out all the intricacies of the infrastructure setup, just pick a VPC, click a few buttons and be ready to go, whether you want a plain operating system, or an application (like WordPress) already installed.

It’s an interesting move into the lower level web and VPS hosting.  I don’t think all the hosting companies will survive this, but for those that will do, the changes are coming, I think.