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.

Language Detection Library for PHP

patrickschur/language-detection – is a language detection library for PHP, which detects the language from a given text string.  Now, a bit more detailed:

This library can detect the language of a given text string. It can parse given training text in many different idioms into a sequence of N-grams and builds a database file in JSON format to be used in the detection phase. Then it can take a given text and detect its language using the database previously generated in the training phase. The library comes with text samples used for training and detecting text in 106 languages.

I tried it briefly with a few languages that I can master a phrase or two in, and it works better with some than with others.  Greek was good, Russian not so much.

Hopefully, the sample data used for training will improve over time, but it’s definitely a good start.

Via this blog post.

 

Design Patterns for Humans

Design Patterns for Human is an excellent effort to explain design patterns in plain words and simple examples.

Design patterns are solutions to recurring problems; guidelines on how to tackle certain problems. They are not classes, packages or libraries that you can plug into your application and wait for the magic to happen. These are, rather, guidelines on how to tackle certain problems in certain situations.

This collection is useful both for novices who are just trying to figure out what design patterns are and how to use them, and experienced developers who need a quick reminder once in a while.  Shorter than a book, simpler than Wikipedia.

WordPress Plugin : WP-CFM – manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes

WP-CFM is a WordPress plugin which helps to manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes between different sites.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks super useful as it allows to separate the configuration options from the content, both of which are stored in the database.  The cherry on top here is the support for WP-CLI, command line interface to WordPress, which is frequently employed for automatically deploying WordPress to different servers and environments.

I have a feeling this plugin will be making its way into our project-template-wordpress setup pretty soon.

Terminals Are Sexy

Terminals are sexy is a curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins & resources for CLI lovers.  There is plenty of links to applications, plugins and configurations.  For me personally, the most useful one was the link to sensible Bash configuration.

How to handle configuration in PHP

Kevin Schroeder has a blog post about the tool that he is building for configuration management in PHP.  The library is still in the early pre-release stage, but it looks like it solves quite a few problems related to configuration, like nesting, inheritance, and environment/context variation.

Here’s the YouTube video that provides a bit of introduction into how to use the tool, and what to expect of it.

The only thing that dials down my excitement in this implementation is the use of XML, even though I understand why he opted for this choice.

I will need a PHP configuration management solution soon, but the priority hasn’t been raised high enough yet for me to jump into the research.  If you know of any other similar tools, please let me know – it all will come handy pretty soon.