Year: 2016

FotoJet – online photo editor

FotoJet

FotoJet is yet another online photo editor.  Like many others it provides a simplified user interface for manipulating images.  Two things in particular that I liked about this service are collages and social media banners.

Collage editing makes it really simple to combine multiple images into one (see the screenshot above).  Social media banners greatly simplifies the creation of images that can be used for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube channel headers.  No more searching for the appropriate dimensions, image sizes, and the like!

PHP backdoors

PHP backdoors repository is a collection of obfuscated and deobfuscated PHP backdoors. (For educational or testing purposes only, obviously.)  These provide a great insight into what kind of functionality the attackers are looking for when they exploit your application.  Most of these rotate around file system operations, executing commands, and sending emails.

One of the things from those files that I haven’t seen before is FOPO – Free Online PHP Obfuscator tool.

The Twelve-Factor App

I first heard about the twelve-factor app a couple of years ago, in Berlin, during the International PHP conference.  It was the basis for David Zulke (of Heroku fame) talk on the best practices for the modern day PHP applications.

The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that:

  • Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project;
  • Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, offering maximum portability between execution environments;
  • Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms, obviating the need for servers and systems administration;
  • Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment for maximum agility;
  • And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices.

The twelve-factor methodology can be applied to apps written in any programming language, and which use any combination of backing services (database, queue, memory cache, etc).

Here are the 12 factors, each one covered in detail on the site:

  1. Codebase: one codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys.
  2. Dependencies: explicitly declare and isolate dependencies.
  3. Config: store config in the environment.
  4. Backing services: treat backing services as attached resources.
  5. Build, release, run: strictly separate build and run stages.
  6. Processes: execute the app as one or more stateless processes.
  7. Port binding: export services via port binding.
  8. Concurrency: scale out via the process model.
  9. Disposability: maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown.
  10. Dev/prod parity: keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible.
  11. Logs: treat logs as event streams.
  12. Admin processes: run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.

These seem simple and straightforward, but in reality not always as easy to follow.  Regardless, these are a good goal to aim at.

The traits of a proficient programmer

“The traits of a proficient programmer – Bridging the gap between competence and proficiency” is a good continuation of the recent “What is a Senior Developer?” discussion.  This time, the question “Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is?” is asked and answered:

Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.

There are also some tips on how to become proficient.

FormSwift – create and sign legal documents for free

FormSwift

More and more paper work is moving into the digital domain, including legal documents.  I’ve previously linked to Docracy – a service that provides a collection of legal documents, as well as tools to negotiate and sign them.  Today I was made aware of another service – FormSwift. Some might find it to be more comprehensive, up-to-date and user friendly than the alternatives.

Have a look at the FormSwift’s collection of the free legal forms, which cover such categories as business, family, financial, life planning, real estate and other.  Their tools are pretty sweet too, with support for Word and PDF files, and an online editor for PDF – not something you see every day.