This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Exploring Deno. This is the first post in the series. Whenever I sit down with a new (either to me, or to the world) programming language, the first thing I end up doing is trying to understand where all the code I’ll use comes from. What’s available by default, what can I [...]
astormA quick note to congratulate anyone working on the @grpc/grpc-js project for their 1.0 last month. There’s been a C++ native module of GRPC around for awhile now, but @grpc/grpc-js a pure TypeScript (that compiles to pretty clean javascript) implementation, and we’ve found That it’s mostly a drop in replacement for grpc [...]
astormThis entry is part 3 of 3 in the series An Introduction to Prometheus and Metrics. Earlier posts include What is Prometheus?, and What are Prometheus Exporters?. This is the most recent post in the series. Last time we ended by musing that Prometheus, while an open source project, still creates a case of vendor lock-in for its users. [...]
astormThis entry is part 2 of 3 in the series An Introduction to Prometheus and Metrics. Earlier posts include What is Prometheus?. Later posts include What are Open Telemetry Metrics and Exporters. In our first article, we covered four core Prometheus concepts and used those four concepts to instrument a simple service written in NodeJS. One [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 3 in the series An Introduction to Prometheus and Metrics. Later posts include What are Prometheus Exporters?, and What are Open Telemetry Metrics and Exporters. One surprising thing about the software instrumentation world, a world that helps us see what our systems are doing, is how opaque the instrumentation [...]
astormA few weeks ago I started working with gRPC for the first time. These days gRPC stands for “general-purpose remote procedure call”, but I still think of it as “Google remote procedure call”, as it’s a project that came out of, and is primarily maintained, by Google engineers. It’s a system for building [...]
astormThe pile of one-off command line scripts I’ve written for my current weekend projecting finally reached the critical mass where they needed some organizing, which led me to discover the yargs project. Yargs provides mature argument and option parsing for command line programs (both --foo and -b style options) and features for [...]
astormHere’s an API design pattern that drives me a little nuts. If you’re using the Apollo GraphQL client to make a data fetching query, your code looks like this. client.query({ query: gql`query { ... your query here ...}` } However, if you’re using the apollo client to make a graphql mutation query, your code looks like [...]
astormI reviewed the original Magento Ultimate Module Creator almost — six?! — years ago. Its creator, Marius Strajeru, just announced a new project that we’ll call Ultimate Modules Creator for C.R.U.D. This looks like it’s a Magento module (Umc_Crud) that provides a set of base classes and interfaces with a standard, opinionated [...]
astormA free-and-open-source (BSD 3 Clause) security checklist for anyone running (or with a vendor who’s running) a Magento 2 system themselves. Provided by security stalwart Talesh Seeparsan, who you should talk-to-slash-hire if you need any computer security work done (Magento or otherwise). The list is pretty bonkers. Seeing [...]
astormA bit of a coda to my post on Symfony HttpClient — I reported the bug to the Symfony project and it was, unsurprisingly, closed with one of those annoying engineering responses: Expected Behavior. In this case Expected Behavior means We acknowledge the behavior and don’t know how to fix it right now and don’t want to [...]
astormIn traditional, “plain Blain” style javascript, it’s relatively simple to access an object’s property via a string // prop-of.ts class Foo { prop1 = 'foo' prop2 = 'baz' prop3 = 'bar' } const foo = new Foo() // using a string constant console.log(foo['prop1']) // using a string's variable const prop2 = 'prop2' [...]
astormA small post that’s a little off my normal beat — sometimes software feels like a never ending series of Y2K like paper cuts. ISBNs are cross-publisher serial numbers for books. If you’re publishing a book, and you want to tap into global supply chains (i.e. have stores be able to order and stock your book), you need to [...]
astormHere’s two quick stories about providing native Windows support for pestle. Home Directory The first issue boiled down to our using the following code to get a user’s home directory $home = trim(`echo ~`); if(!is_dir($home)) { throw new Exception("Could not find home directory with echo ~"); } This works for the *nix [...]
astormI just had a nice reminder that sometimes reporting a bug to a public software forum can matter, even if you suspect/know it’ll be closed out. Someone familiar with the Symfony docs process ran across the same problem I had with the HttpClient, and appears to have had the same “what is even happening reaction I had”, [...]
astormJust a quick note that a new version of Commerce Bug (3.2.4) is out in the world. This release fixes a small bug where the jsTree elements in the KO Scopes tab could interfere with the styling of jsTree elements that core Magento used in places like the Access Control Roles tree. If you follow my feeds on Stack Overflow or Twitter you [...]
astormThis entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Async PHP. This is the first post in the series. One luxury afforded to the average PHP programmer is never having to worry about threads or asynchronous programming. Unlike other dynamic languages of its era (ruby, python, etc.), PHP has no built-in concept of a thread. PHP also came along early [...]
astormThis entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Pestle. Earlier posts include Pestle 1.1.1 Released, Pestle 1.1.2 Released, Magento 2 Setup Migration Scripts, Pestle 1.2.1 Released, Sending Text Messages with PHP, pestle, and Nexmo, Pestle 1.3 and AbstractModel UI Generation, Pestle 1.4.1 and the Merits of Inheritance, Pestle 1.4.4 Released, [...]
astormComing up through the dynamic languages and having my “typed” language be C, I mostly missed out on the whole “generics” thing. Cue the late 2010s and generics are a thing in TypeScript and every so often there’s a push to get generics into PHP. A few years back I figured it was time to learn what was going [...]
astormI’m working my way through James Cogland’s Building Git and it’s a delightful read. Git and its role in building software is fertile grounds for exploring the social interactions of the software industry. Git’s history, in brief, is the Linux Kernel project started using a version control system (named BitKeeper) [...]
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