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React to Database Changes with OpenWhisk Actions
23 April 2018
Read moreOne of the best features of CouchDB is its change feed which allows us to get a feed of the changes happening on our database. It's also possible to have a serverless function (examples are for IBM Cloud Functions but should also work for Apache OpenWhisk) that fires in response to activity on that change feed. I have a database of events that I want to react to when they happen, but the change feed doesn't include the actual document that was added - but you can add one of the built-in functions to a sequence to make that happen. This post will show how to achieve this by wiring up a built-in action to fetch the document with another action of our own that then handles the data.
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Handle Webhooks with Serverless PHP
20 February 2018
Read moreDid you know you can serverless with PHP? OK, so serverless is clearly not a verb, but since I love serverless tech and have also loved PHP for longer than I'm going to admit (the dates of the earliest posts on this blog might serve as a clue), using these technologies together is definitely my idea of a good time.
I included an example of a serverless endpoint to receive incoming webhooks in my talk at PHPUK last week and I got a few questions about it so I thought I'd share that example in written form.
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What does a Developer Advocate do?
30 January 2018
Read moreI'm a Developer Advocate (you might also hear job titles like Developer Relations, Developer Evangelist) and I'm constantly asked what that means. What do I do? The answer is different for every one of these jobs but there are some common themes. After 18 months of practice at answering this question, I think I'm ready to give it a go.
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Script for Migrating Related Posts in Wordpress
29 January 2018
Read moreI couldn't find the script I needed to migrate my existing related-post data to a new plugin so I fiddled about and wrote a rather hacky one. I thought I'd share it in case someone else needed it!
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Copying CouchDB Data Between Laptops
02 January 2018
Read moreI'm a regular and happy user of Apache CouchDB, so much so in fact that I'm writing a library to talk to it from PHP. While working on tweaking a feature, I realised that the laptop I use for development didn't have the right/enough data on it to test …
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Slack Enterprise Grid and BotKit
06 December 2017
Read moreI have the pleasure of using Slack Enterprise Grid on a daily basis as IBM has adopted it internally, I work there, and there are far too many of us to use a single slack instance. The main downside of Slack Enterprise Grid (apart from having about 15 slack organisations running in your client all the time) is that it returns different data when integrating with the Slack Web API and RTM (Real Time Messaging) systems. We had some bot integration that stopped working as a result, and I ended up moving to BotKit and then using a mixture of the RTM and Web API from Slack to get things to work. I won't remember how I did it so I thought I'd better write it down.
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Login and Switch Spaces With Bluemix CLI
28 November 2017
Read moreAfter answering a bunch of questions about the Bluemix CLI tool for IBM Cloud, I thought I'd share my personal cheatsheet in case it helps anyone looking for examples!
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Testing API calls in PHP with Guzzle Mocks
21 November 2017
Read moreI'm working on a CouchDB library for PHP, and so I needed to write some tests for it. CouchDB has an HTTP API so I'm basically making web requests and while I could certainly set up a test database and run full-on integration tests, there are a few limitations with that approach. Firstly: it means I'm testing the database as well, which isn't what I want and brings extra dependencies that make the tests harder to run. Also: I want to be able to test error cases, rate limiting and so on, that would be difficult to recreate reliably.
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Live Demo: Risks and Rewards
17 November 2017
Read moreI'm not a huge fan of the live demo in conference talks - it's really hard to do well so I see a very large number of bad ones. Also, it's super hard work to include them in my own talks in a meaningful way because they are so difficult to pull off. I could write a very long list of reasons not to ever live demo (nobody wants to watch you type, now you are talking to your laptop, conference wifi rarely works, you could tell me three much more useful things in the time you've spent doing this ...) but in truth as developers we love the "new shiny" and it can be super helpful to get an actual walkthrough of how to do a particular thing. So if you absolutely must live demo, here's my own general plan and tactics:
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Connecting PHP to MySQL on Bluemix
23 August 2017
Read moreMost 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.
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Removing Object Properties Before Var_Dumping Them
11 August 2017
Read moreI'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 ...
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Handling Incoming Webhooks in PHP
24 July 2017
Read moreAn 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.