Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

PHP overwrite of built-in constants (true is false)

Here is a scary thing I picked up on Reddit PHP:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

Until PHP 5.6 this was throwing a parse error, but from then on – it’s just fine.  Scary, right?

The comments on the Reddit thread are quite helpful.  Technically, this is not overwriting (shadowing?) since the original constant is still available:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (\false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

If you are a fan of nightmares, there is also this link, which will shake your religious beliefs …

i3 – tiling window manager

In the last few days my attention was unfairly distributed between a whole lot of tasks.  The fragmentation and constant context switching affected my productivity, so I briefly revisited my toolbox setup, in hopes to find something that I didn’t know about, forgot about, or have greatly underutilized.

One of the things that came (again) on my radar was terminal multiplexer tmux.  I’ve blogged about it before.  I used it for a while, but at some point, it faded away from my daily routine.  The two most useful features of tmux are:

  1. Persistent sessions, where you can work on a remote machine, detach your terminal, disconnect from the machine entirely, and then, at some point later, connect again and continue from where you left off.  With simpler workloads and reliable Internet connection, this became less useful to me.  When I do need this functionality, I use screen, which is more often installed on the machines that I work with.
  2. Terminal multiplexer, where you can split your terminal screen into a number of panels and work with each one like it’s a separate terminal.  This is still useful, but can be done by a number of different tools these days.  I use Terminator, which supports both horizontal and vertical screen split.  Terminology is another option from a choice of many.

I thought, let me find something that people who used tmux have moved on to.  That search led me, among other things, to “ditching tmux” thread on HackerNews, where in the comments a few people were talking about i3 tiling window manager.

Continue reading i3 – tiling window manager

Web design : from zero experience to a high paying job

Richard Yang, a UX designer at Sony, shares his path from a guy with zero experience in design to a respected professional with a high paying job.  Much like with any professional, in the past, present or future, it wasn’t an overnight success, but an inhuman amount of work and dedication, with plenty of failure.

Continue reading Web design : from zero experience to a high paying job

Downdetector – a weatherman for the digital world

Downdetector is yet another one of those services that monitor major web services and provides and lets you see if any of them is experiencing any issues or outages.

You can search for specific providers or browse by company or issue type.  There’s also a weekly top 10.  What I like in particular are comments for each report, where you can get some feedback from other users experiencing the problem.

 

Software Engineering at Google

Fergus Henderson, who has been a software engineer at Google for 10 years, published the PDF document entitled “Software Engineering at Google“, where he collects and describes key software engineering practices the company is using.

It covers the following:

  • software development – version control, build system, code review, testing, bug tracking, programming languages, debugging and profiling tools, release engineering, launch approval, post-mortems, and frequent rewrites.
  • project management – 20% time, objectives and key results (OKRs), project approval, and corporate reorganizations.
  • people management – roles, facilities, training, transfers, performance appraisal and rewards.

Some of these practices are widely known, some not so much.  There are not a lot of details, but the overall summaries should provide enough food for thought for anyone who works in the software development company or is involved in management.