GitHub Improvements

GitHub has recently announced a whole lot of improvements to their service and functionality.  For me personally the following bits were super exiciting.

Improvements to the code review

reviews popover

Approve or require changes

You’re no longer left on your own to figure out if a comment was important. Or if that emoji means “Go ahead, looks great!” Or “Please no, this is likely going to bring the site down!”

With Reviews, you can leave your comments as suggestions, approve the changes, or request additional changes—on any pull request.

Improvements to the GitHub Profile page

github profiles

See what’s behind your green squares

GitHub profiles show your life and career as a developer. We’ve taken the contribution graph to new heights with your GitHub timeline—a snapshot of your most important triumphs and contributions.

But there is more – projects, notes, comment drafts, etc.  Check the full announcement.

BitBucket Pipelines and Docker for PHP Developers

I’ve been meaning to look into Docker for a long while now.  But, as always, time is the issue.  In the last couple of days though I’ve been integrating BitBucket Pipelines into our workflow.  BitBucket Pipelines is a continuous integration solution, which runs your project tests in a Docker container.  So, naturally, I had to get a better idea of how the whole thing works.

Docker for PHP Developers” article was super useful.  Even though it wasn’t immediately applicable to BitBucket Pipelines, as they don’t currently support multiple containers – everything has to run within a single container.

The default BitBucket Pipelines configuration suggests the phpunit/phpunit image.  If you want to run PHPUnit tests only, that works fine.  But if you want to have a full blown Nginx and MySQL setup for extra bits (UI tests, integration tests, etc), then you might find smartapps/bitbucket-pipelines-php-mysql image much more useful.  Here’s the full bitbucket-pipelines.yml file that I’ve ended up with.

MySQL, PHP and “Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry”

Anna Filina blogs about an interesting problem she encountered with when working on a PHP and MySQL project:

MySQL was complaining about “Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry”. I had all the necessary safeguards in my code to prevent duplicates in tha column.

I gave up on logic and simply dumped the contents of the problematic column for every record. I found that there was a record with and without an accent on one of the characters. PHP saw each as a unique value, but MySQL did not make a distinction, which is why it complained about a duplicate value. It’s a good thing too, because based on my goal, these should have been treated as duplicates.

She also mentions two possible solutions to the problem:

My solution was to substitute accented characters before filtering duplicates in the code. This way, similar records were rejected before they were sent to the database.

and

As pointed out in the comments, a more robust and versatile solution would be to check the collation on the column.

I’m sure this will come in handy one day.

git: history of a source code line

git is one of those tools that no matter how much you know about it, there is an infinite supply of new things to learn.  Here’s a handy bit I’ve discovered recently, thanks to this StackOverflow comment:

Since Git 1.8.4, git log has -L to view the evolution of a range of lines.

[…]

And you want to know the history of what is now line 155.

Then, use git log. Here, -L 155,155:git-web–browse.sh means “trace the evolution of lines 155 to 155 in the file named git-web–browse.sh“.

Absolutely brilliant!  I used to suffer through this via an iteration of git blame and git show to the point of custom bash scripts.

400,000 GitHub repositories, 1 billion files, 14 terabytes of code: Spaces or Tabs?

Here is an interesting bit of research – do people prefer tabs or spaces when programming the most popular languages?

Tabs or spaces. We are going to parse a billion files among 14 programming languages to decide which one is on top.

The results are not very surprising and somewhat disappointing (for all of us, tab fans):

tabs vs. spaces

As far as PHP goes, I’m sure the choice of spaces has to do with the PSR-2 coding style guide, which states:

Code MUST use 4 spaces for indenting, not tabs.

On a more technical note, I think this is also related to the explosion of editors and IDEs in the recent years, which, as good as they are, aren’t as good as Vim.  Vim allows for a very flexible configuration, where your code can be formatted and re-formatted any way you like, making tabs or spaces a non-issue at all.

Regardless of the results of the study, what’s more interesting is the method and tools used.  I’ve had my eye on the Google Big Query for a while now, but I’m too busy these days to give it a try.  The article gives a few insights, into how awesome the tool is.  1.6 terabytes of data processed in 864.6 seconds:

That query took a relative long time since it involved joining a 190 million rows table with a 70 million rows one, and over 1.6 terabytes of contents. But don’t worry about having to run it, since I left the result publicly available at [fh-bigquery:github_extracts.contents_top_repos_top_langs].

and:

Analyzing each line of 133 GBs of code in 16 seconds? That’s why I love BigQuery.

If you enjoyed this article, also have a look at “Analyzing GitHub issues and comments with BigQuery“, which works with a similar-sized data, trying to figure out how to write bug reports and pull request comments, so that they would be acted upon faster.