Blog

Heroku "No app specified"
31 May 2016

I've been having a maddening problem where one (but only one) of my heroku apps doesn't know which heroku app it is, which means I need to append --app app-name to every single command. It seemed to happen when I moved my app to an organisation rather than having it …
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MySQL 5.7 Introduces a JSON Data Type
21 April 2016

There's a new JSON data type available in MySQL 5.7 that I've been playing with. I wanted to share some examples of when it's useful to have JSON data in your MySQL database and how to work with the new data types (not least so I can refer back to them later!)

MySQL isn't the first database to offer JSON storage; the document databases (such as MongoDB, CouchDB) work on a JSON or JSON-ish basis by design, and other platforms including PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server also have varying degress of JSON support. With such wide adoption as MySQL has, the JSON features are now reaching a new tribe of developers.

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Simple Access Control for CakePHP3
11 April 2016

The newest version of CakePHP doesn't ship with built in ACL, which means you need to write your own. Personally I think this is a smart move, having looked at the one-size-fits-all solutions for previous versions of the framework and knowing that every system has different requirements, this version has good hooks and documentation on how to add something that works for your application. I thought I'd share what worked for mine.

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Change Form Input Type in CakePHP3
16 March 2016

I've been having my first experiences with generated code, generating a new admin backend using CakePHP3 (yes CakePHP is still around, it's alive and doing rather well in fact!). So far it's going great and producing a much more complete solution than I'd have managed for myself on this timescale.

One thing is bothering me though: it guesses form input types from the database column types, which mostly works well but sometimes it picks something that doesn't reflect the way that the user will store information in this field. It's actually pretty easy to change the forms that get generated though, so here's an example.

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Documentation First: A Recipe for API Success
23 February 2016

I've shipped a handful of greenfield APIs in recent months for different clients, and in each case I've been building the documentation before the API. I hadn't really recognised it as a pattern until someone else commented on it, but I do find this approach has worked well for my projects, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on this in a bit more detail.

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PHP 7.0 (and 5.6) on Ubuntu
11 February 2016

PHP 7 is released but for those of us who don't usually compile our own PHP, it can be a long wait for our preferred distro to release the packages we want. For Ubuntu, I'm using a PPA which allows both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 to be installed, including things like extensions, at the same time. It was very easy to set up (I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 but this process should also work on older versions back to at least 14.04 which is the previous LTS) so here's a quick walkthrough of what I did.

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Simple One-to-one Meetings
09 February 2016
Recently I was giving some advice (that I was asked for, which is novel) regarding one-to-one meetings between developers and either team leads or management can be structured. My thoughts really boiled down to some very short points (this is why sometimes, those meetings take 15 minutes and other times they take 3 times that for a monthly update!). In case they're useful to anyone else, here's my meeting outline:
- What's going well/what are you excited about?
- What's tedious/annoying or actually a problem?
- What could I be doing that I'm not?
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Use Ngrok for Testing APIs on Dev
27 January 2016

Recently I was hastily building an API for a client and I wanted to run some tests against it. I've written before about using Runscope for API testing, but this was against a local dev platform (inside a VM, not directly on my laptop) rather than a public API. The same problem arises if you want to access a local site or API from elsewhere or from a mobile device. In all these scenarios, ngrok is your friend.

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Handling Composer "lock file out of date" Warning
22 January 2016
Composer is dependency management for PHP, and it consists of two main files:
- composer.json where you specify your dependencies
- composer.lock where composer itself records exactly which precise version of every library and every dependency of every library it picked, so all installs will be identical
Crucially, the composer.lock also includes a hash of the current composer.json when it updates, so you can always tell if you've added a requirement to the composer.json file and forgotten to install it.
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PHP Web Services: 2nd Edition
20 January 2016

I'm delighted to announce that the second edition of PHP Web Services is published! This isn't an entirely new book but in my own biased opinion it is a much better job of this topic than I did the first time around :) Following from the feedback we got on the …
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Upgrade To Better Passwords in PHP
11 January 2016

The password features in PHP aren't exactly new, but I see lots of applications from "before" which aren't being migrated to better practices. I have some strategies for doing these migrations so I thought I'd share my main approach, plus a similar-but-different one I saw in the wild (OK it was in CakePHP, so not too wild!).

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OAuth2 with PHP's built in Streams Functions
07 January 2016

Most of the time when I work with APIs from PHP, I use Guzzle - it's awesome and modern and elegant. However some of my work is with legacy platforms and I recently had a situation where we needed to integrate with a API using OAuth2, and launch that integration before …
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