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.

GitHub : Security Alerts and Team Discussions

GitHub blog recently announced a couple of interesting new features.

Firstly, Security Alerts.   For now it only supports Ruby and JavaScript, but hopefully other languages are coming soon (PHP/Composer please!).  Security Alerts will notify repository owners if there are any known security issues in any of the packages that the repository is using.  Similar, I guess, to who SensioLabs Security Check works, but integrated with your GitHub.

Secondly, Team Discussions. This is yet another way place for the team to communicate.  There are Issues and Pull Requests already.  But those are more specific and more focused.  For anything that doesn’t have a single issue, or doesn’t have a PR yet, a Team Discussion might be a better place.

ninja-mutex – Mutex implementation for PHP

ninja-mutex is a simple to use mutex implementation for php. It supports different adapters (flock, memcache, mysql, redis, …) so you can setup it as you wish. All adapters (if set up properly) can be used in multi server environment – in other words lock is shared between web servers.

Amazon AWS : Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users

This must be one of the greatest presentations on the Amazon AWS that I’ve ever seen.  It uses a gradual approach – from small and simple to huge and complex.  It covers a whole lot of different Amazon AWS services, how they compliment each other, at which stage and scale they become useful, and more.

Even quickly jumping through the slides gave me a lot to think (and Google) about.

Firefox : The Quantum Era

“Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster” is an insightful article showcasing the big changes happening with the Firefox browser.  It seems, the pendulum is swinging back towards the browser that almost became irrelevant.  I think that competition is good for everyone, and it has proven much more so in the end-user applications.  New ideas, new approaches, new technologies, and plenty of stimuli for the Google Chrome and other browser teams to respond with something even better.

WordPress 4.9 Field Guide

WordPress 4.9 is just around the corner (scheduled for release tomorrow, November 14th).  This version brings an impressive number of new features and improvements.  The stats so far are:

Roughly 400 bugs, 181 enhancements, 7 feature requests, and 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed in WordPress 4.9.

Figuring out all these changes and how they affect you is an effort in itself.  But don’t you worry!  Here’s the WordPress 4.9 Field Guide, which showcases all the main changes and provides plenty of additional resources to follow up.

Wow!  WordPress 4.9 packs quit a punch!