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.
Botwiki is an impressive collection of bots for a variety of social networks and collaboration tools – Twitter, Slack, Tubmlr, Facebook and Messenger, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, Snapchat, and more. Â You can browse all these by network or by category.
Here’s a random Twitter bot for you:
@holidaybot4000Â is a Twitter bot that tweets holidays around the world for the given day, typically together with an image of the country’s flag.
“50 Things You [Probably] Forgot To Design” is a collection of all those tiny (and not so tiny) details that are often left out during the design process for a website, web application, or mobile app. Â It covers a variety of bits from favicons to login forms, splash screens, pagination, and welcome emails.
If you only it was available now as a checklist …
AWS Blog lets us know that Amazon has finally implemented one of the most useful features ever – descriptions on Security Groups rules. Â Previously, one could provide a description to the Security Group only, for example: “Proxy Server Access”. Â Which wasn’t very useful, as it was almost obvious. Â But now one can add a description to every rule inside the Security Group. Â So when you have a Security Group with a bunch of IP address ranges, you can now describe each one of them. Â For example: “HQ Office”, “UK Office”, “Boss At Home”, etc.
This TravisCI blog post welcomes AJ to the team. Â In it, there is a bit that caught my attention (except, of course, the one about bra burning):
If you’re so inclined, you can follow her on Twitter or run curl cv.soulshake.net.
Wait a second … A what? curl for the CV? Â I had to try it out. Â Here’s an even better way, for reading all the slides:
p=1; while [ $p -lt 9 ]; do curl -N cv.soulshake.net/$((p++)); read; done
Oh. My. God. Lo and behold, this is the coolest tech CV I’ve ever seen. Ever. Period. Â TravisCI is so lucky to have her!
P.S.: If you are interested in how this was done, here a couple of blog posts – one and two.
My colleague Andrey Vystavkin has been setting up a testing environment for our CakePHP projects recently.  We had one before, of course, using PHPUnit.  But this time we wanted to add Google Chrome headless browser with some form of JavaScript test suite, so that we could cover functional tests and a bit of front-end.  Andrey described the configuration of NightwatchJS on TravisCI in this blog post.  If you are more of a “show me the code on GitHub” person, have a look at this Pull Request (still work in progress) on our project-template-cakephp project.
Once we are happy with the TravisCI configuration, we’ll be bringing this setup to our BitBucket Pipelines environment as well.
The setup is also based around CakePHP framework, but it’s easy enough to adopt it to any other framework, PHP or not.