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.
“Beyond Passwords: 2FA, U2F and Google Advanced Protection” is a rather lengthy, but insightful article on the subject of 2-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication, and other related options. It nicely explains which option is which and how it works, as well as clears a lot of confusion between these terms.
The article itself is not too technical, so it’s strongly recommended for anyone dealing with authentication, sensitive data, and security in general.
Jeff Geerling shares the best way to get the full PHP version string. I’d think that “php –version” externally or “echo PHP_VERSION” internally would do the job. However, that’s not exactly right, as there are a number of inconsistencies on different platforms. The best option seems to be the combination of the PHP_MAJOR_VERSION, PHP_MINOR_VERSION, and PHP_RELEASE_VERSION constants.
$ php -r 'echo join(".",[PHP_MAJOR_VERSION,PHP_MINOR_VERSION,PHP_RELEASE_VERSION]);'
7.2.12
I’ve blogged about jq – a lightweight and flexible command line JSON processor – a few times already (look here and here). Today I came across this blog post that showcases jq in deep comparison of really large JSON files (5 GB or so). This is not something that I need on a daily basis, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy one day.
If you are spending a lot of time on GitHub, following people, teams, and projects, then checkout DevHub – a TweetDeck-like application for GitHub that works on Android, iOS, and as a web application.
It conveniently brings together your repositories, notifications, and all the other goodies, helping you to significantly cut down the time and mouse clicks.
The evolution goes on. Now that we’ve kind of sorted out most of our infrastructure, development tools, flows and processes, I guess, it’s time to look deeper into the things we’ve had for a while and reiterate over them.
Recently, I’m seeing a lot of blog posts on articles on how to write good commit messages. Sure, we’ve had these for a while. But lately things get a little bit more serious.
Here’s one (in Russian) that I’ve read recently. Here’s another one (in English) that shares some of the concepts and suggestions.
What are they saying? Well, “write better commit messages”, obviously. But there are a couple of specific bits which I found interesting. They are:
For the skeptics among you, I slightly share your feeling. It does seem like a bit too much overhead. But as someone who works with an ever-growing team on a large number of projects, I think there is a place for it. It’ll take a while to integrate, update the process, and enforce the discipline, but I think it’s well worth it. At the very least, it deserves a try.