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    Blog

  1. Quickly add Amazon Cloudfront as a CDN

    15 July 2014

    Right now I'm working on an application which is experiencing lots of interest - and therefore lots of load! We needed to look at ways of trying to bring down the pressure on the servers, and decided to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for our image files. It was surprisingly painless to implement once I got into it so here it is in case it's helpful.

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  2. View Only Headers with Curl

    08 July 2014

    When working with curl, it can give lots of excellent and detailed information, but sometimes it is too much! Today I'm fiddling with the caching headers on a client's application, so I'm only interested in seeing the headers and not the body of the response. Making a HEAD request changes …

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  3. Video: Git Remotes and Tracking Branches

    03 July 2014

    Here's a little demo video that I put together to explain pushing/pulling with multiple remotes and how tracking branches make this easier. It's one of the chapters from my "Git Adventures" talk, but it didn't make it in to the talk in Amsterdam last week since we chose a …

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  4. Understanding Tracking Branches in Git

    03 July 2014

    Here's a topic that took me a while to understand in git, and now (I think!) I do, I thought I'd write it all down while I can remember!

    Some branches in git (such as your origin/master branch) will usually track the remote branch that they are related to. But what if you want to create a relationship between local and remote branches? Or stop them from tracking? Here's some pointers

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  5. Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins

    01 July 2014

    The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don't have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I've had a few questions about the setup so I thought I'd share how it works.

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  6. What Got You Involved in Open Source?

    12 June 2014

    I did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I'd loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed.

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  7. Logging to Stdout with Monolog

    06 June 2014

    My worker scripts have really basic logging (as in, they echo when something happens, and I can see those in the supervisord logs). Which is kind of okay, but I wanted to at least add timestamps in to them, and maybe send emails when something REALLY bad happened.

    I'm a …

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  8. Colourless Git Output

    02 June 2014

    I teach git and often have issues with bad projectors where you can't see the colours. Recently I had a setup where even white on black was more or less invisible, but using black text on a white background worked okay. There's lots of documentation on how to turn on …

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  9. PHP 5.6 Benchmarks

    19 May 2014

    A while ago I did some benchmarks on how different versions of PHP perform in comparison to one another. This isn't a performance measure in absolute terms, this was just benchmarking them all on the same laptop while it wasn't doing anything else, and averaging the time it took to run the benchmark script.

    Recently I ran it again for versions PHP 5.3 through PHP 5.6 and I thought I'd share my results:

    php-performance-may-2014

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  10. Easy Lint Check for JavaScript

    13 May 2014

    I'm introducing lint checking on one of my projects, because it didn't have a build process yet and I love this as a great place to start. Oh, and because we managed to commit broken syntax! So I set up a php lint job (I will share my travis config in another post) and tried to work out doing the same thing for JavaScript.

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  11. Beanstalk, Pheanstalk and Priorities

    07 May 2014

    I've got an application that uses Beanstalkd to queue up messages, and some PHP worker scripts that grab messages from the queue and process them. Messages get added by the web application, but can also be added by cron - and when I add a bunch of messages via cron, I …

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  12. Copy/Pasting and Vim

    02 April 2014

    I'm a vim user and I somehow completely missed this excellent feature until much more recently than I care to admit! Usually vim has its own clipboard, but it doesn't share with the operating system. You will need a vim-gtk install, this isn't available in really basic vim (I'm a …

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