Welcome! I'm Lorna: engineer, author and speaker. I'm a Developer Evangelist and I love technology and sharing technology with others. On this site you'll find my blog and links to all the other things I think you (or I) might need to know about me - my opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation. If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
From The Blog
23 Aug
2017
Connecting PHP to MySQL on Bluemix
Most of the PHP I write runs on Bluemix - it's IBM self-service cloud, and since I work there, they pay for my accounts :) There are a bunch of databases you can use there, mostly open source offerings, and of course with PHP I like to use MySQL. Someone asked me for my connection code since it's a bit tricky to grab the credentials that you need, so here it is. Continue reading
11 Aug
2017
Removing Object Properties Before Var_Dumping Them
I'm working on a project at the moment (a PHP library for CouchDB, if you must know) that is designed to make HTTP calls and therefore holds a Guzzle HTTPClient object as an object property. This is great except when I need to debug something and the output of my call to var_dump() is several screens high ... Continue reading
24 Jul
2017
Handling Incoming Webhooks in PHP
An increasing number of applications now offer webhooks as an integration, often in addition to an API. The classic example, familiar to most developers, is the GitHub webhooks which can notify your other systems such as CI tooling that a new commit has been added to a branch. If you imagine how many repositories exist on GitHub, and how many other systems react to changes on each repository ... there's a reason they are excellent with webhooks! Whether it's your source control, updates from your IoT sensors, or an event coming from another component in your application, I have some Opinions (TM) about handling webhooks, so I thought I'd write them down and include some code as well, since I think this is an area that many applications will need to work with. Continue reading
