Category: tech

  1. 5 Reasons to Consider Upgrading Your PHP Platform

    05 February 2015

    In recent years, the release cycle of PHP has become much shorter. We now have a much more controlled and well-publicised process of releases, and moving between each version is no longer a leap of faith. The newer versions have HUGE performance improvements, great features, and better security, and the software is free to use. Yet we have a very, very long tail of PHP installations on older versions (around 75% on entirely unsupported versions at this point). Many of the companies I talk to think that upgrading will be pointless and painful, but that's not my experience of migrating PHP projects. Here are a few things you might like to think about or be aware of before you make the decisions that "not broken" is good enough for your applications.

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  2. Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki

    21 January 2015
    In trying to get company documentation off google docs and people's laptops and into a more useful format, I have been researching developer-friendly tools for business documentation. Requirements went something like:
    - must handle words and documents
    - should be available locally, bonus points for revision history
    - must publish to the web, and ideally be editable there
    - should accept content in markdown
    - must have access control (which wiped out my original plan of using a static site generator)

    While I worked on this, we were using the wiki feature in GitLab ... which pretty much hit the nail on the head. Further investigation showed that the wiki feature in GitLab (and indeed in GitHub) is a ruby gem called Gollum.

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  3. Set Up Your First Hubot

    13 January 2015

    It took me far too long to get my first hubot working; when I finally sat down to get it going the process was much easier than I expected! So here's a little guide in the hope that this helps you get started too.

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  4. My Leanpub Toolchain

    12 January 2015

    I have a couple of books (so far!) published on Leanpub, and I often get asked by aspiring authors how it works. Everyone's tools will be different, but this is what works for me

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  5. Hubot and Slack

    08 January 2015

    I'm enjoying using hubot to integrate services very easily and both give updates and respond to commands in chat. One of my hubots chats to us in slack rather than in IRC, and there are a couple of gotchas that I wish I'd known about before I started!

    • Hubot will …
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  6. Todotxt on Android and Ubuntu

    02 January 2015

    I'm a big fan of good tools, however struggle to find products that fit me because there are some key constraints:

    • I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu 14.10)

    • I don't use a pointing device. At all. If I can't use a tool from the keyboard, I can't use it at all (as a side effect, I use keyboard enablers in my browser so if your website has "helper" keyboard shortcuts, I probably can't use that either)

    • My other devices (phone, tablet, work phone) are all android

    Taken together, this makes finding tools a challenge - but I've had good experiences with todotxt and the ecosystem around it.

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  7. Status Check on All Vagrant Machines

    09 December 2014

    Much of the development I do these days uses vagrant machines to make sure that my code is running in the correct environment. This is great, but spinning up too many machines at once can rather stretch the resources of the computer you're running them on - and I keep starting …

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  8. Vim and HTML Tags with the Surround Plugin

    04 December 2014

    Marking up documents is always tedious, and usually there are shortcuts available. My favourite document format tool is Pandoc, literally a box of document-conversion tricks! Today though I was not so lucky so I marked up a plain text file as HTML by hand ... or rather, using my favourite vim tricks so I thought I'd share them.

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  9. Announcing the Git Workbook

    21 October 2014

    I'm very pleasedtitle_page to announce the immediate availability of my new book Git Workbook, costing $20 from LeanPub. This is a book that you "do" rather than "read"; it's a series of chapters (30 ish so far) each covering one specific git skill.

    Each chapter includes an explanation of the skill in question, followed by a hands-on exercise so that you can work through the skill yourself, and ends with a tickbox so you can keep track of how far through you are. It has quizzes, diagrams, mildly amusing stories, and as many other examples as I could think of that could help anyone to take in this technical topic and understand how to apply the techniques covered.

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  10. Git Submodules for Dependent or Common Code

    15 October 2014

    Submodules are one of the most powerful and most mistrusted features in git, at least in the web development part of the internet where I spend my time. I've seen them go horribly wrong, but I've also had teams adopt submodules and have their development process run much more smoothly as a result - so I thought I'd take a moment out of my day to write down the process (and the gotchas) of development with submodules.

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  11. Ada Lovelace Day: The Women Who Share My Journey

    14 October 2014

    It's Ada Lovelace Day. If you don't know what that is, you can read more about it here: http://findingada.com/. Go ahead, I'll wait.

    While being a woman in tech can be isolating, the women I meet along this journey make the experience what it is. I have fabulous male friends and mentors also, but today I'm focussing on the women around me. They are the modern-day equivalent of the cousins that you grow up with, share stories with, laugh and cry with. They have shared the personal and the professional, the joy and the fear. Today seems like a good time to call out some of the women that I'm so glad to have around me.

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  12. Install CharlesProxy CA Certificate on Android

    29 September 2014

    I use Charles Proxy extensively for debugging all kinds of applications, and lately I've been using it more with mobile devices. One of the killer features of Charles is its ability to intercept SSL traffic. This is hard - and rightly so, it should be difficult to inspect SSL traffic!

    Charles handles this by using the server's SSL certificate for the connection from Charles to the remote server, and then using Charles' own SSL certificate for the "last mile" back to your browser or device. This means that the connection will be flagged as insecure; Charles' certificates aren't trusted by your browser or device - but we can easily change that.

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