Back in they day, I ran a Tumblr blog named Magento Quickies where I’d post shorter, less in-depth posts about my travels through Magento’s source code. This Programming Quickies categories is the successor to that Tumblr blog. You’ll find all the old Magento Quickies content here, as well as new short posts about programming in general.
This section has its own RSS feed, the old Magento Quickies feed should should be redirecting, and we’re cross posting notifications for new posts over to magento-quickies.tumblr.com. In other words, you shouldn’t need to know any of this, but the duct tape that keeps the internet held together isn’t aging well, so your mileage may vary.
Below you'll find all the Programming Quickies articles on the site.
Blog as bookmarks again — this Visual Representation of SQL Joins contains a number of useful visualizations for how joins work in SQL. I’ve been carrying around a print out of one of the images for over a decade and this post will let me recycle one more piece of paper.
astormI’ve long used OS X and MacOS’s command line say command as a “read that back to me” proof reading tool. Unfortunatly, in recent Mac OS release say can be a bit flakey and I’ve had to look for substitutes. I don’t know much about the folks behind it, but mimic been working out OK for me. The voices [...]
astormAlpine Linux has become increasingly important as it’s a popular base linux for Docker containers. One it’s many quirks is it doesn’t use Debian (apt) or RPM (yum) software repositories. Insteak alpine uses a package managment client called apk, which reads from repositories that are neither debian, nor RPM [...]
astormI’ve been digging into the internals of Linux package management systems the past few days (side note: if you’re successfully delivering a piece of packaged unix software to the entire linux community without the help of the distro maintainers: my hat’s off to you) and it took me a surprising amount of time to unearth [...]
astormI haven’t used it yet, but based on the intro docs and kicking a few tires, deployer seems like a fine “implemented in PHP” deployment system — or maybe I’m just a sucker for any modern PHP system that hasn’t jumped on the type safety bandwagon.
astormJust using the old blog as a bookmark service for this arrays v. slices in Go articles. I think this came across my radar a year or so ago because the official go docs sort of blow past arrays to get to the “new” stuff. If you’re in a hurry — Overall, slices are cleaner, more flexible, and less bug-prone than [...]
astormIn my longer introduction to PHP generators we didn’t talk much about a generator’s “key” values. In other words — when presented with code like this function someGeneratorFunction() { yield 'foo'; yield 'baz'; yield 'bar'; } $generator = someGeneratorFunction(); foreach($generator as $key=>$value) { echo [...]
astormDespite maintaining an open source version of their code base, there were a lot of things about a pre-Adobe Magento that gave a lot us in the open source world cause for — not alarm exactly — but some heavy side-eye. One of those was Magento’s approach to composer. On one hand — huzzah! Composer support! On the [...]
astormI did another quick survey of what’s state of the art for PHP and Amazon’s Lambda (i.e. Serverless, i.e. Amazon will run a function for you in the cloud that can respond to HTTP requests and interact with Amazon’s various services, getting you out of the sys-admin business). One project I see cropping up in my various [...]
astormI just updated my example Magento 2 travis build file to work with the newer versions of M2 coming out of GitHub. This file does the heavy lifting of cloning an M2 Magento repo, running the installer, and adding the composer module you want to test to the project. Travis remains one of those how is this free wonders for anyone doing [...]
astormI’m still finding the PHP Internals Books to be a welcome breath of fresh air. Today is was their instructions on getting a working build enviornment for the PHP-SRC repo up and running. Straight forward, no nonsense instructions. There’s a bit of assuming you know your way around compiling things but that’s always [...]
astormThanks to Nicolas Batty (who seems to have the good sense to live offline) for a correction to the old Magento 2: Fixing Area code Not Set Exceptions quickies post. In the original post I’d recomended a fix for area code not set errors in Magento 2 CLI command by doing something like the following public function __construct( [...]
astormFuzzers are a category of security testing software that will throw all sorts of random data at a software system looking for flaws that can then be exploited by individual penetration testers. Sort of like throwing a bunch of paint around the room trying to find the invisible man. I found this talk about a PHP Internals Fuzzer from [...]
astormThis post by Julia Evans (author and artist of the amazing Bite Sized Linux zine) caught my eye. I can’t tell if this is an old-man-computer thing or if it’s a legitimate troubling trend (probably both), but as consumer web sites increasingly become a Squarespace/Wix sort of thing and not a DIY sort of thing, the DIY tools [...]
astormVinai Kopp (of magetv fame) just released a small project with an improved cache cleaner for Magento 2, and it includes a file watcher. i.e. if you change a file that typically requires you to clean your cache to see changes, (like a controller or a layout XML file), this watcher will automatically notice and clear your cache for you. It [...]
astormZephir is a programming language for building PHP extensions. As in, the .so files that extend the PHP language itself. Normally you need to use the C programming language to create a PHP extension, but Zephir is an intermediate language you can compile down to C code, (using the provided tooling). Its build system also automatically [...]
astormFiling the prose project under things I want to checkout if I ever have time, if only to see how it handles comma spliced sentances like this one.
astormIn the begining (or near enough to it), PHP had a set of functions for talking to MySQL databases — mysql_connect, mysql_query, mysql_.... While newer database APIs like the mysqli_ functions and PDO came along these older functions hung in there and remained hugely popular right up until the end. The end being their removal from [...]
astormI don’t have any first hand experience with it, but Moltin’s a new-to-me API Only ecommerce service/start-up. API only meaning there’s no UI, just REST endpoints for you to call and perform the basic operations of any ecommerce system. If you only have shallow knowledge of other open source and commercial ecommerce [...]
astormI just released version 1.4.3 of pestle over the weekend. Mostly a maintaince release and tightening up things I stumbled across while working through the Learning Magento with Pestle screencast series with my patreons. We’v also got a few additional contributors to the project. Pestle is a command line framework I built to manage [...]
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