Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

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.

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!

tus.io – open protocol for resumable file uploads

tus.io, in their own words:

People share more and more photos and videos every day. Mobile networks remain fragile however. Platform APIs are a mess and every project builds its own file uploader. There are a thousand one week projects that barely work, when all we need is one real project. One project done right.

We are going to do this right. We aim to solve the problem of unreliable file uploads once and for all. tus is a new open protocol for resumable uploads built on HTTP. It offers simple, cheap and reusable stacks for clients and servers. It supports any language, any platform and any network.

Adventure in composer private repositories

First of all, I would like to take this opportunity and wish composer a happy birthday and many more years to come.  It’s been five years, and the world of PHP has changed so drastically that not many people remember how it used to be before.

I would have completely missed the birthday if it wasn’t for all the Google searching I did while working on a weird problem.  But before I get to the problem, let me set the scene.

The big part of composer success is Packagist.org – the repository of almost 100,000 packages (93,572, according to statistics, as of this writing, to be precise), which help one to solve pretty much any problem that PHP can be used for.

As good as the Packagist is, there is often a need for a repository or a package elsewhere.  Whether it’s a commercial library, or sensitive corporate code, having an ability to store it outside of public eye and handle with the same ease and the same tool as the rest of the dependencies is a very welcome feature.

Now we are getting closer to what actually happened.  A while back, I’ve setup deployment and development process for WordPress-based projects.  WordPress doesn’t support composer natively, but there are ways to make it work.  Huge thanks here goes to Roots.

So.  The composer.json file was filled with additional repositories and requirements which told composer where from to fetch things, and where to install them.  Here’s an example:

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "package",
        "package": {
            "name": "wordpress",
            "type": "webroot",
            "version": "4.4.1",
            "dist": {
                "type": "zip",
                "url": "https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/archive/4.4.1.zip"
            },
            "require": {
                "fancyguy/webroot-installer": "1.1.0"
            }
        }
    },
    // ...

This got especially useful, when we need to work with commercial plugins, which we couldn’t push to our public repositories, and which we didn’t want to re-distribute with every project.

So far so good. Fast-forward to a few month ago. We are setting up similar development and deployment process, but now for CakePHP-based projects. Things are much easier, since CakePHP 3 natively supports composer for the application itself and for its plugins.

But we still have the need for private repositories here and there, so we follow the same setup as we did for WordPress. This week, we had an unexpected roadblock, which wasn’t making much sense to me. When trying to pull a CakePHP plugin from a private repository, we’d get a nasty exception like this:

$ composer update
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
  - Installing qobo/cakephp-test-foo (1.0.1)
    Loading from cache


                                                                                                                                              
  [RuntimeException]                                                                                                                          
  Unable to get primary namespace for package qobo/cakephp-test-foo.                                                                          
  Ensure you have added proper 'autoload' section to your plugin's config as stated in README on https://github.com/cakephp/plugin-installer

This was confusing. First of all, I’ve never seen this error before. Secondly, I’ve read the README and had the autoloader section in the composer.json as instructed. Thirdly, very similar plugins were working fine.

Long story short, the issue wasn’t related to whether or not the GitHub/BitBucket repository was private or public. It was related to how the repository was configured in the composer.json. Reading and re-reading composer documentation about Repositories finally helped.

You can have a look at our test setup:

CakePHP plugin installer requires the autoload section in composer.json.  But, when the repository is of type “package“, for some reason, the autoload section is ignored altogether.  The RuntimeException “Unable to get primary namespace for package” is thrown by cakephp/plugin-installer (src/Installer/PluginInstaller.php line 274).  The problem is not actually in the cakephp/plugin-installer, but somewhere in the composer.  Maybe it’s intentional or maybe it’s not.  I didn’t have the time to investigate and understand it further.

Switching the repository to type “vcs” fixes the problem.  It also simplifies the composer.json file and removes the need for multiple version definitions, as now composer is using BitBucket/GitHub API to fetch available versions.

How To Keep Your Best Programmers

I really liked this article – How To Keep Your Best Programmers.  It’s not your average three paragraphs and a link, I admit. It’s somewhat of a long read.  But it does a good job of explaining why people in general, and good developers in particular choose to leave or stay in the company.

It’s difficult to quote as it flows continuously, but if I had to choose, I’d use this as a teaser:

For some background, check out this video from RSA Animate. The video is great watching, but if you haven’t the time, the gist of it is that humans are not motivated economically toward self-actualization (as widely believed) but are instead driven by these three motivating factors: the desire to control one’s own work, the desire to get better at things, and the desire to work toward some goal beyond showing up for 40 hours per week and collecting a paycheck.

Frustration with organizational stupidity is usually the result of a lack of autonomy and the perception of no discernible purpose.

Not that I am a good programmer, but it helped me understand some of my own career jumps…