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.

composer-plugin-qa – Composer Plugin for PHP Quality Assurance Tools

composer-plugin-qa is a Composer plugin which adds all the most popular PHP quality assurance tools as composer scripts, so that you don’t have to install and set them up one by one.  The list of tools includes the following:

  • PHPUnit: Testing Framework
  • PHPCOV: CLI frontend for the PHP_CodeCoverage
  • Paratest: Parallel testing for PHPUnit
  • DbUnit: Puts your database into a known state between test runs
  • PHPLOC: A tool for quickly measuring the size of a PHP project
  • PHPCPD: Copy/Paste Detector
  • PHP_Depend: Quality of your design in the terms of extensibility, reusability and maintainability
  • PHPMD: User friendly frontend application for the raw metrics stream measured by PHP Depend
  • PhpMetrics: Static analysis tool, gives metrics about PHP project and classes
  • PHP_CodeSniffer: Detects violations of a defined set of coding standards
  • PHP-CS-Fixer: A tool to automatically fix coding standards issues
  • Security-Checker: Checks if your application uses dependencies with known security vulnerabilities

This list is very similar to the one in my other recent post.

The Nightmare Letter: A Subject Access Request under GDPR

“The Nightmare Letter: A Subject Access Request under GDPR” article features an example worst-case scenario (or so) of a Subject Access Request (SAR) under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

On one hand, the example letter is quite extreme.  On the other – it’s quite realistic, especially given the (almost) template.

So, who’s ready for this?  And who’s laughing now?

Found via the comments to this Slashdot thread, which is also worth a read.

Accurate Instagram Filters Reconstruction

homm/color-filters-reconstruction is a GitHub repository with a number of tools that help to automatically or semi-automatically deconstruct the color filters applied to a picture by such services as Instagram, Google Photos, and others.

Here’s how it works:

This method is based on three-dimensional lookup tables and their two-dimensional representation: hald images. The core idea is simple: a sample hald image with a uniform color distribution is processed using a target color filter with an unknown transformation algorithm. The processed hald image can then be used as a filter for a very accurate approximation of that target color transformation.

A resulting hald image could then be used in various software such as GraphicsMagick or Adobe Photoshop. You can implement those hald images in your iOS or macOS app with CocoaLUT. Also, hald images could be converted to the 3D LUT cube file format, which is common in a great number of video editing software.

Stack Overflow for Teams is Now Available

StackOverflow, the greatest online resource for developers, has announced the availability of the StackOverflow for Teams.  This is a spin off service which allows developer teams to run private instances of StackOverflow for knowledge and information sharing needed for non-public projects.

This sounds like a great tool to replace a variety of missing and outdated information in wiki’s, README files, and emails that every software project eventually gathers.

PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog

AWS Developer Blog ran this post a while back – “PHP application logging with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Monolog“, in which they show how to use Monolog and Amazon CloudWatch together in any PHP application.  It goes beyond a basic configuration of connecting the two, all the way into setting up log metrics, etc.