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.

Reading postmortems

Once in a while a seemingly straightforward article turns into a goldmine of links and resources. This happened to me today with this one – “Reading postmortems“.

Not only this article itself is a very nice roundup of common sources for system failures, but it also links to a couple of awesome references:

  • Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. This is both a talk and a paper.
  • danluu/post-mortems – a GitHub repository with a collection of publicly available postmortems from a variety of organizations, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, NASA, GitHub, and more.

If you still have no idea what postmortem is, Wikipedia explains.

New in PHP 7.4

“New in PHP 7.4” is a quick and simple introduction into changes and new features of the upcoming PHP 7.4, which is planned for release in December of 2019. In brief:

  • Preloading (parsed source code caching)
  • Typed properties
  • Improved type variance
  • FFI (Foreign Function Interface) – a way to run C code from within PHP
  • Null coalescing assignment operator (??=)
  • ext-hash always enabled
  • Password hashing registry

GrumPHP – PHP quality control tool

GrumPHP is yet another quality control tool for PHP. But unlike a million other – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, and the like – this one is more of a tying knot. GrumPHP integrates via git hooks. It runs one more of the other tools, making sure that the changes you are committing are up to the par.

The support for other tools is excellent. You’ll find anything from the basic unit tests and coding style checks to commit message formatting and content, Robo tasks, and even custom shell scripts.

Monorepos: Please don’t!

I have only recently discovered the concept of monorepos. It does sound interesting and I am yet to try it out, or, at least, dig deeper into the subject. But then, there are people who have strong opinions against them, and I the reasoning makes all the sense to me. Here’s a nice one: Monorepos: Please don’t!

Swap – currency exchange rates library

Swap is a currency exchange rates library for PHP. It provides a single interface to conveniently work with currency exchange rates and integrates with more than a dozen of different exchange rates providers.