web development

PHP-FPM tuning: Using ‘pm static’ for Max Performance

“PHP-FPM tuning: Using ‘pm static’ for Max Performance” looks at different process management settings in PHP-FPM: static, dynamic, and ondemand, and the way they affect performance. The default – ondemand – might work well for you if you have a large server with plenty of resources and not so many actual visitors. Running on a smaller instance, or expecting high spikes of traffic might require you to look into your PHP-FPM configuration and adjust it. The article is just what the doctor ordered.

Personally, I prefer having a dedicated instance for the web server, but that instance being as small as possible. With that, figuring out the correct settings for static process management is easier. It also minimizes all those nasty cases of running out of memory, swapping, and having an excessive CPU utilization. Which is especially useful when running on Amazon AWS instances.

Change SQL mode for MariaDB in Fedora 27

After I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 27, I started experiencing some weird issues with most of the projects I am developing locally. Trying to save anything into the database that involves dates, started throwing the following errors:

Error: SQLSTATE[22007]: Invalid datetime format: 1292 Incorrect datetime value: '2017-11-30T13:30:48+02:00' for column 'timestamp' at row 1

A quick look around showed that Fedora 27 ships MariaDB v10.2, while the previous distribution version shipped MariaDB v10.1. Digging through the changes between the two versions didn’t help much, even though there is slight mention of the related change.

SQL_MODE has been changed; in particular, NOT NULL fields with no default will no longer fall back to a dummy value for inserts which do not specify a value for that field.

StackOverflow is much more helpful, as always. These two threads – one and two – in particular, explained the changes and suggested the fix. I had to either fix the projects I was working on, or modify my local configuration to use the old SQL mode. This thread provided some more details, so the final solution was adding the following to the /etc/my.cnf and restarting the MariaDB service:

[mysqld]
sql-mode="NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE"

And now we are back to normal.

7 Skills Of An Effective Developer

“7 Skills Of An Effective Developer” is a great article that goes over what it takes to become an effective developer. The choice of skills is rather standard and has been covered in other articles before:

Communication
Empathy
Planning
Presentation
Documentation
Testing
Git

but I really liked the examples that were used to illustrate them – simple, yet very realistic.

css-purge – CSS cleaner

css-purge is a tool that does the following:

A CSS tool written in Node JS as a command line app or library for the purging, burning, reducing, shortening, compressing, cleaning, trimming and formatting of duplicate, extra, excess or bloated CSS.

What’s the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?

Here’s a good explanation on what’s the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript. I know I’m not the only one confused.

Chicken or the egg

A confusing bit of history is that JavaScript was created in 1996. It was then submitted to Ecma International in 1997 for standardization, which resulted in ECMAScript. At the same time, because JavaScript conformed to the ECMAScript specification, JavaScript is an example of an ECMAScript implementation.

That leaves us with this fun fact: ECMAScript is based on JavaScript, and JavaScript is based on ECMAScript.

I know.

It sounds exactly like the time-travel trope of people being their own parent — a little wonky, but kind of fun to think about.