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Ttytter: Command Line Twitter Tweaks
04 July 2013
Read moreI've been using ttytter for quite a while, it's a superbly inoffensive twitter client - and it's console-based. This makes it easy to use from the keyboard, fast, and also makes it look a bit less like twitter if that's not something people should be seeing over your shoulder!
I have customised a few settings which I find superhelpful, so I thought I'd share my config file and say a bit about some of the entries in there. The config for ttytter is held in a file called .ttytterrc in my home directory. Mine looks like this:
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DC4D 6: Not-Programming for Programmers
25 June 2013
Read moreIn case you haven't seen the news, the next episode of Day Camp 4 Developers is coming up on Friday 26th July. This edition is about getting beyond being awesome at the code, which we know that you are, and picking up some other skills to complete you as a profesional. Whether you work in a large international corporation, a smaller company, or alone, we've got content that will make a difference.
Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual conference, and it's $40 (about 25 quid for UK people). If you can't make it on the day, just get the video ticket and download the recorded sessions later. What I'm trying to say in this paragraph is that there are quite literally no excuses for missing out on this :)
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Are Subqueries RESTful?
13 June 2013
Read moreTwitter is great for one-liners, but it's very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I'd be picking a different medium to reply:
@lornajane sory for getting on your nervs with #rest,but are subquerys (like couchDB does) restfull to? is there a rule? like .../?type=bla
— Maximilian 'Berghoff (@ElectricMaxxx) June 12, 2013
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PHP Version Adoption
04 June 2013
Read morePHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don't do is upgrade. PHP's current …
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Simplest PHP Generator Example
22 May 2013
Read moreI really like the generators feature that's arriving in PHP 5.5, and since we're now into release candidate releases, it's actually not that far away. I've been speaking on this topic and I thought I'd share my trivially simple code example from my slides.
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Setting Multiple Headers in a PHP Stream Context
07 May 2013
Read moreLast week I tried to create a PHP stream context which set multiple headers; an Authorization header and a Content-Type header. All the examples I could find showed headers built up as a string with newlines added manually, which seemed pretty clunky and not-streams-like to me.
In fact, you've been …
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What Goes in Source Control?
29 April 2013
Read moreShort answer: everything! However we need some good directory structures and source control configuration to make that a really practical answer, so this article is a quick outline of my usual advice for a good source control structure for a standard web project. The examples are for a PHP project but I'm sure you could apply this to your own language of choice, also.
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The Mathematics of Recruitment and Training
22 April 2013
Read moreThe PHP jobs market is hot, very many people find it hard to recruit the skilled staff that they need to achieve the goals of their organisation. I meet a wide variety of organisations in this technology space, and they all tell me the same story: it's really difficult to get good, qualified people. And I believe that this is true, I know plenty of developers too and although I'll usually try to put people in touch where it makes sense to do so, it's not as if there is a great reservoir of hidden PHP talent somewhere.
This isn't a rant about salaries, the skills of new graduates, or the trials of dealing with recruiters, although each of those is worth a post in itself. It's about the mathematics of providing your organisation with the talent it needs at the time that it needs it.
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Pretty-Printing JSON with Python's JSON Tool
15 April 2013
Read moreToday's quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my "Debugging HTTP" talk at the ever-fabulous WhiskyWeb conference last weekend. When working with JSON on the commandline, here's a quick tip for showing the JSON in a nicer format:
curl http://api.joind.in | python -mjson.tool
You need …
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Video Course on Learnable: OOP PHP
28 March 2013
Read moreI'm delighted to announce that my new video course on Object-Oriented PHP is now available on Learnable! It's very much an introduction, aiming to cover WHY objects are so cool as well as how to declare and use one. The course is a mix of video (filmed in my kitchen …
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Ideas Of March: Don't Read The Comments
26 March 2013
Read moreIt's that time of year again, time for an "Ideas of March" post (you can read more about this initiative on Chris Shiflett's blog). Most years many bloggers pledge to write more often, start or restart their blogs, and generally embrace the idea that some thoughts are worth more than 140 characters. Chris himself wrote this year about the demise of google reader, and about blogging as a way of curating and retaining ownership of your ideas, which I thought was an excellent point to make.
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First Phing Plugin
25 March 2013
Read moreI'm a huge fan of Phing and use it regularly for build and deployment tasks. Often, I'll ask about a plugin that I wish existed, and get a very courteous "patches welcome" from the nice people in the #phing channel on freenode. This has happened a few times, so I thought I should probably look at how to make a new phing plugin, this article shows you how to make the simplest thing I could think of: a simple "hello world" plugin.