Category: Web work

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.

Go Monorepo

As a maintainer and contributor to multiple, and often related, git repositories, I often find myself thinking that there must be a simpler way.

Consider, for example, a variety of CakePHP plugins that we develop and maintain at work.  Sure, each one provides a completely separate bit of functionality and has its purpose as a standalone project.  But, at the same time, they all have enough overlap that we use a common cakephp-plugin-template repository to keep things in sync, and also require cakephp-utils plugin from all of them.

It’s only natural to consider other ways of doing things.  Sure, I tried git submodules before, but they don’t quite cut it.  Something is still missing.

Today I came across the Go Monorepo website.  Which makes me wonder even further down this road.  There are also a few other tools and alternatives mentioned in this article.

That’s not something that I’ll jump into right now, but it’s definitely something I’ll consider to try out in the nearest future.

AnsibleFest Austin 2018 via Jeff Geerling

If you missed the opportunity to attend the recent AnsibleFest Austin 2018 event,  here are a couple of interesting links for you, via Jeff Geerling’s blog (aka geerlingguy):

There’s plenty of stuff to play with over the next weekend or two.

The Land Where PHP Uses eval()

“The Land Where PHP Uses eval()” is an interesting post powered by the study of 2,000 Open Source PHP projects.  It details a number of scenarios where developers have used the eval() function and suggests the better ways for most of these.  Despite of how dangerous and inefficient the eval() is in PHP, there are still good reasons to use it in some cases.  Read the full post to see which are those.

The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas

Itamar Gilad, of ex-Google fame, has an excellent post – The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas – which describes a process for selecting better product ideas and implementing them with confidence, minimizing the risks and maximizing the team efficiency.

Unlike many other similar posts, this one is very practical, detailed, and relies on iterations, feedback, communications, and ties together different roles within the company or the team.