These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Here’s an interesting study of the .com domain names. It appears that only about 1/3 of the registered domains are in use by legitimate websites. The rest are either spam, email-only, empty, broken, etc.
Only about 100,000 domains were crawled to provide a representative sample. But to me, the numbers look quite realistic. If only, I would push the porn and gambling sites into the “in use” category, rather than have them separately.
“When I started writing PHP…” is a nice look at how PHP ecosystem has changed in the last 20 years. Those of us who have been using it since then, are guaranteed to drop a nostalgic tear.
The running joke “you’re not a real PHP developer until you’ve written your own CMS and discarded it” wasn’t a joke yet. It was just becoming reality, but it wasn’t old enough yet to be a joke. (Yes, I wrote my own CMS and discarded it.)
awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates is an extensive collection of Amazon AWS CloudFormation templates for a wide range of resources and services. Some of these can be used as is for deploying production infrastructure, others are good starting points for those of us who are still learning.
“Build load-balanced servers in AWS EC2 using CloudFormation” is an excellent guide on deploying load balancer servers with EC2 instances to Amazon AWS cloud with CloudFormation infrastructure management tool. The guide covers a variety of topics from the actual deployment to security and monitoring.
There are many different approaches for load balancing traffic in Amazon AWS, and this one is not a holy grail solution, but it provides plenty of insight into available tools and options.
“How To Speed Up The Code Review” is a collection of excellent tips and strategies on how to make your Pull Requests easier to review. These work equally well for Open Source projects and for proprietary repositories.
The gist of this article is: don’t make large pull requests, and don’t mix different types of changes within the same pull request. Read the whole thing for suggestions on how to actually do that.