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The First Thousand Blog Posts
30 April 2019
Read moreThis is the 1000th post on https://lornajane.net. People ask "how do you even do that?" and the short answer is "start in 2006", but the long answer isn't all that long.
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Handy Beanstalkd Admin Console
08 April 2019
Read moreI've been building apps with queues lately and mostly using beanstalkd as my queue because it is very simple, very fast and on my platform it is [apt install beanstalkd] -easy to install. I have also been using a handy web interface for beanstalkd which I like so much that I felt I ought to share! It's beanstalk-console, which is a PHP-based web interface to one (or many) beanstalkd servers.
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HTTP Toolbox
27 February 2019
Read moreAs Web Developers, we need to know how to work with HTTP from every angle. I gave a 2-hour tutorial at PHP UK that included some of my most trusted tools - but it was sold out and a bunch of people asked me if there was video (there wasn't, tutorials make little sense when videoed). Instead, I thought I'd try to set out a self-study version of the workshop (I rarely teach these days so I'm unlikely to deliver it anywhere else).
There's a slide deck, some exercises and a sample repo on GitHub ... let's dive in!
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Using Tags in your OpenAPI Spec
26 February 2019
Read moreWorking with OpenAPI is bringing so many possibilities to the way that developers work with APIs, it's exciting! The spec is very comprehensive though and I've found myself answering questions on individual aspects of it recently, so I thought I'd capture one or two of those things here. Today: tags.
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Windows removed my grub menu
28 January 2019
Read moreI know this will happen to me again at a bad moment so I'm putting it here on my blog and hoping I can find it in my future hour of need ...
My work machine is a Windows PC, with dual boot to the Ubuntu partition that I actually use …
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Ready-to-wear API Collections with OpenAPI and Postman
08 January 2019
Read moreHave you noticed that API providers are starting to offer "descriptions" of their APIs? These are usually OpenAPI specifications, computer-readable documents that describe every aspect of an API's endpoints. They can be used to generate documentation, SDKs, but now they can also be used for my favourite API-related activity: poking around! Postman just added a feature to allow importing OpenAPIs and I love it.
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Test Web Requests with a Local RequestBin
14 December 2018
Read moreI've been a long-time fan of RequestBin, but it's no longer active since it suffered so much bad traffic. It's never been too difficult to set up locally and when I tried to do that last week, I realised it has got even easier because it now has a docker-compose configuration.
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Are you Creating, Curating or Consuming?
06 December 2018
Read moreI've been thinking lately about my own interactions online, especially around content. There are three main ways that I work with content: creating, curating and consuming. Each has their own place but I'll start by outlining each one.
Creating content is all about putting your own creations out for others to share. I've had this blog longer than I care to discuss and certainly since before microblogging was really a thing. It's much lower investment to throw out a quick tweet about something and in lots of cases it's a more appropriate medium
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How NOT to Review a Pull Request
22 October 2018
Read moreExamine the diff and comment on it, a line at a time
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Muffet: quick and easy link checking
05 September 2018
Read moreIn my not-so-new job I work on Nexmo's developer portal and that means a lot of documents, a lot of links, just a lot to keep track of! One thing I worry about is changing something and breaking links from somewhere else, so I wanted to be able to check for existing links, broken links, and to include internal links like http://example.com/home#something as well since all our titles are linkable in that way.
Enter: muffet
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Support for Speakers
26 August 2018
Read moreI've been a conference speaker for 10 years; I've given many talks, been to many events, organised a few events, and now have Opinions (TM) about conference speaking. This tweet showed up in my feed when someone tweeted at me to thank me for my support in their talks.
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Vim settings for working with YAML
15 August 2018
Read moreHaving managed to avoid YAML until quite recently, my vim installation wasn't well set up at all for working with it. It needs more config settings than plugins, so I thought I'd write down what I found helpful. I'm using it quite a lot now I'm working with OAS (used to be Swagger) API definitions.