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.
An interesting talk on the history of init and systemd across various different flavors of unix. Touches on software history, how things end up the way they are, and how we respond to change. I am not immersed in this particular unix community, but this talk does a good job of hinting at the later contours of that community.
astormPersonal diffrences about CLI user exprience asside, Psalm looks like a solid static analysis tool for PHP codebases. “Static analysis” meaning it looks at your entire codebase and tells you about things that might be problems. It’s a great example of how the work that’s gone in the PHP parser over the past four [...]
astormI cam across this surprisingly cogent explanation of what SELinux linux is, including a bit of history about where it came from. There’s probably a paper to be written about the various attempts to improve and build on top of the simple-yet-complex chmod/chown/chgrp permissions scheme at the heart of unix. This video isn’t [...]
astormAs a rule I avoid entrepreneuria-media. There’s a sameness to the over confidant young sounding, white sounding voice these men choose to adopt that leaves me squicked out at best, and after a while you realize the way to have a career and life with some level of independence is to leave the media behind and start doing the work. [...]
astormI’ve been doing more backend NodeJS programming recently and I was pleasantly surprised to discover something new about a programming language I’ve been using for for over 20 years. Although, to be fair, the callback syntax I was asking about callSomeFunction(function heyLookANameForMyFunction(){ }); wasn’t valid in [...]
astormIf you liked the video from the last quickies post you may also enjoy Asynchrony: Under the Hood, a talk from @codebytere that covers similar territory. The presentation style is a bit more formal, but that suits the density of the information being transmitted. You get the event loop, the microtask queue, and an overview of generators [...]
astormThis JSConf talk describes Javascript’s event loop in greater detail than the average javascript programmer typically needs to worry about. If you want to up your javascript game and understand why code X seems to run faster than code Y, this is a good place to start.
astormFearless Security: Memory Safety is a broad overview of some ways the Rust programming language improves on memory management and race conditions in languages like C or C++ without going full handwave/don’t worry your pretty head about that we’ll manage everything for you. As I’ve gotten more real world experience with [...]
astormWhile this isn’t a straight up decorator tutorial, it does describe a practical application of the pattern which (unlike most of the decorator pattern documentation I’ve read) is a decent way of getting your head around the who/what/where/when/why of this pattern, particularly if you’re interested in Symfony’s [...]
astormI’m not sure I completely understand what Twitter Cards are — “frozen caveman developer who has drifted away from publishing software, etc.”. I tend to think of them as the stuff Twitter automatically adds to a tweet when you include a link. One thing I do know about Twitter Cards is if you accidentally publish [...]
astormI’m not sure I completly understand what Twitter Cards are — “frozen caveman developer who has drifted away from publishing software” and all that. I tend to think of them as the stuff twitter automatically adds to a tweet when you include a link. I have recently learned though if you accidently publish something [...]
astormAnother year, another small bug fix release for Commerce Bug. This one takes care of some PHP 7.2 syntax errors (Object is no longer allowed as class name portion) and a slew of weird edge cases where Magento’s event/observer system would send through data that should be an object, but was not an object. It’s unclear if the [...]
astormBlog 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 [...]
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