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.

10 Years of Git: An Interview with Git Creator Linus Torvalds

AtlassianGit10year

Linux.com reminds us that git is celebrating its 10th birthday this year.  An interview with git creator Linus Torvalds sheds some light on to how and why it happened, and how long it took.

You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting” so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or so is hidden, but everything else is there. The work was clearly mostly during the day, but there’s a few midnight entries and a couple of 2 a.m. ones. The most interesting part is how quickly it took shape ; the very first commit in the git tree is not a lot of code, but it already did the basics – enough to commit itself. The trick wasn’t really so much the coding but coming up with how it organizes the data.

So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first *kernel* commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right.

Very impressive!

And, of course: HAPPY BIRTHDAY GIT!  The world is a much better place with you.

Google is shutting down Google Code

Google is “Bidding farewell to Google Code“:

When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.

Personally, I never particularly liked Google Code, but it was nice to see an option being there.  I have, however, been a user of some other Google services that were shut down (still crying at nights for the Google Reader), so I know the feeling.  Hopefully, with enough support, all projects will move over to better alternatives, like GitHub and BitBucket, where the contributions will rise and communities grow.

GitHub Archive

Open-source developers all over the world are working on millions of projects: writing code & documentation, fixing & submitting bugs, and so forth. GitHub Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis.

githubarchive

PHP tags – once and for all. Yet again.

For those of us who have been using PHP since the early version 3 days and such, here is a modern day refresher for PHP tags:

If a file is pure PHP code, it is preferable to omit the PHP closing tag at the end of the file. This prevents accidental whitespace or new lines being added after the PHP closing tag, which may cause unwanted effects because PHP will start output buffering when there is no intention from the programmer to send any output at that point in the script.

And from the comment on the same page:

Since PHP 5.4 the inline echo <?= ?> short tags are always enabled regardless of the short_open_tag (php.ini) setting.

For me personally, closing PHP tags are a part of muscle memory.  I’ll have to unlearn that, I guess.  And in regards to the inline echo tags, I was under the impression that they are being phased out together with the other short tags (<? … ?>).  Apparently, I was wrong.  They are here to stay.  Which explains why there are in PSR-1, PSR-2, and in CakePHP 3 (which requires PHP 5.4.16 and fully adopts PSR-2) in particular.