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.

Dotfile madness

“Dotfile madness” is an excellent look at the problem of hidden data and configuration files that seem to be multiplying lately in the users’ home directories:

We are no longer in control of our home directories.
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them. All I can do is sit here knowing that in the darkness, behind the scenes, they are there. Waiting in silence. Some of those programmers decided to additionally place some normal files and directories in the same place. Those are clearly visible every time I execute ls in my home directory. 

While there is no easy centralized solution to this problem, as each application’s developer decides for himself, the article proposes a better way of doing things, reminding us about the XDG Base Directory Specification. This spec allows for a much finer control of where things go via the XDG_* environment variables.

Nice one!

gita – manage multiple git repositories

gita is a command line tool to manage multiple git repositories in parallel. You can easily check the status of several repositories, pull, push, commit, and so on.

This is a nice alternative to how we are handling things at work, with hundreds of repositories all around, but with a lot of overlap between them too. For us, a custom set of scripts works pretty well, with a combination of a powerful terminal emulator. Terminator, for example, provides handy functionality of split screen view, with grouped terminals, where multiple screens can be easily updated with a single command input.

PHP CEO on Twitter

@PHP_CEO is a new corporate humor goldmine on Twitter. It’s very much like I am a developer, but, you know, from the CEO perspective.

Some of those tweets are nothing short of brilliant!

PHP : Composer Galaxy

PHP has one of the greatest, in my opinion, dependency managers – Composer. The tool works mostly with the public projects via the Packagist website (although it also supports private repositories).

There are over 200,000 packages available on the Packagist to choose from. However, the stats could be a lot better.

Today I came across a mind-blowing visualization of the composer packages and the dependencies between them. Have a look at Code Galaxies Visualization. You can find specific packages via the search, or interactively navigate the star map, like you are in the spaceship.

Stunning!

Our Software Dependency Problem

“Our Software Dependency Problem” is a great article going in-depth into the subject of the dependency management during software engineering.

Dependency managers have scaled this open-source code reuse model down: now, developers can share code at the granularity of individual functions of tens of lines. This is a major technical accomplishment. There are myriad available packages, and writing code can involve such a large number of them, but the commercial, legal, and reputational support mechanisms for trusting the code have not carried over. We are trusting more code with less justification for doing so.

Not only it nicely describes the problem in simple terms, but also provides practical examples and solutions to it. In particular, I enjoyed the section that suggests how to improve dependency evaluation in terms of design, code quality, testing, debugging, maintenance, usage, security, and licensing.