Category: Programming Quickies
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.
Magento 2 and Travis Continuous Integration
Over the weekend I ended up doing some gardening in my astorm/magento2-travis repositoy. This repo has simple starter travis.yml file that builds and installs a simple Magento enviornment to run your tests in. Travis is an amazing free resource for running your projet’s continuous integration system — if you haven’t [...]
astormLaravel Noun
This started out as a snarky post but then I realized how often I need a lookup table like this. What have I become? Product What it Does Laravel Passport A composer package to give your Laravel based API OAuth2 features and capabilities. Laravel Cashier A composer package to simplify Stripe and Braintree’s subscription services in [...]
astormCreate PHP Extensions in Go instead of C
This is more of a “I would like to check this out later” than “I endorse this” link, but this project looks like an interesting way to get your go code running in a PHP enviornment.
astormWhy Does “=” Mean Assignment?
My favorite part of this too-brief foray into the history of = as an assignment operator is how crazy keyboards were in the 60s and 70s were.
astormHomebrew Shuffles PHP Support
Gripng PSA follows. Homebrew, the really great package manager and services system for MacOS, has recently shuffled around thier support for PHP. It sounds like the main PHP packages are being pulled into the core repository, but that extensions (mcrypt, memcached, etc.) are being dropped and users will need to install these via pecl. On [...]
astormDesign Patterns Failed. Why? Should we Care
I came across this talk video from Brian Marick at the Deconstruct software conference. It was a refreshingly candid take on why the classic software design patterns are generally considered burdensome chains instead of the pattern language they set out to be. And the question is why. I think you can have several reasons, but I’m going [...]
astormMore PHP Internals Resources
It’s always nice when a late answer to a Stack Overflow question shows up with more information than you wanted/needed. The specifics here on dealing with the thread safe resource manager are worth it (if you’re looking for that sort of thing), but more important are the links to the two personal blogs covering random [...]
astormHow PHP Runs a Program
When I found the PHP Internals site a few months back, I noticed there was a small credit at the bottom. Built by Thomas Punt & Liam Mann Some Googling showed that Thomas Punt had written this How PHP Executes — from Source Code to Render article for sitepoint. While the article was accurate, like a lot of pro internet content [...]
astormUnderstanding Git Rebase
I first saw a version of this talk (from @ellotheth) at PHPPNW in 2015, and it’s the first thing that made git rebasing make sense to me. Too many rebasing tutorials are so busy selling you on the benifits that they gloss over what’s happening to repository. Gemma’s talk not only dives into what a git rebase actually [...]
astormUsing a Magento 2 Theme for Transactional Email
Given Magento 2’s enterprise ambitions, it wouldn’t surprise me if most stores are routing their transactional emails through a seperate (or a series of seperate) email systems. Because Enterprise™. However, if you’re sticking to Magento’s default email system for the password reset, order thank you, sign up, etc. [...]
astormUsing “Not Quite JSON” with PHP
One of the odd side effects of JSON’s wide spread success is how often you’ll run across data that’s not quite json A hello world example looks something like this {a: "Hello World"} If you look at that string, you might think Hey, it’s a JSON string! However, it’s not strict JSON — the a needs to be a [...]
astormUseful Magento 2 JavaScript Helper Functions
I had to fix a typo in it (thanks Vinai!), so why not squeeze a link out of my Magento 2: uiElement Standard Library Primer article from last year’s uiElements Internals series. I’m reasonably proud of that, and its predecesor UI Component series. I’m also diappointed (but not surprised) that frontend development in [...]
astormNew Docs Site for PHP Internals
A new documentation site for PHP Internals (the pile of C code that’s used to build PHP itself) magically appeared a few weeks ago and it’s pretty great. While the PHP Internals Book tries to give you the context you need to work in the PHP source code, this new PHP Internals site is trying to document every symbol and the [...]
astormSimple Command Line Image Manipulation is OS X/MaxOS
File this one under old-but-new-to-me tech: OS X/Mac OS ships with a simple command line application named sips that lets you perform simple image manipulations like resizing, rotating, image flips, crops, etc.
astormLarge Configurable Products in Magento 2
Magento 2, like its forbearers, starts to fall apart when you push larger amounts of data through its systems. One example of this is Configurable Products. Configurable Products allow users to pick options for a product (size, color, etc.), and have each configuration mapped onto a single Simple Product entity. In theory, there’s [...]
astormLarge Excel Data Dumps
I don’t know much about its provenance, but this small python program is just the thing if you’re trying to export a large Excel spreadsheet to a far more usable/malleable CSV file. Particularly useful for folks with Macs, since Numbers, Libre Office, and Open Office don’t handle large files well (Numbers and Open [...]
astormDatasette
It’s been long enough and I’m now old enough that I can’t quite remember when I started following Simon Willison’s work. He’s the co-creator of Django and one of those early online programming voices that were invaluable if you were cobbling together how all this stuff worked without direct access to the [...]
astormLine On Sierra
When it comes to retro gaming I’m mostly a dillitante, and I’m mostly chasing nostalgia. That probably explains why I’ve only just discovered this fantastic four year old series from a modern game critic (LIne Hollis) playing through the origial Sierra On-Line lineup. I mention this here, on a programming blog, because [...]
astormUnfriendly Fire
One of the less fun parts about working in a C code base is dealing with the toxic machismo that’s still present in the wider culture. The people I work with are (fortunatly) great, but when I’m wading through the internet for answers I come across things like this time and time again. The top answer is a rant that spends [...]
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