Author Archives: lornajane

27 Nov
2015

Generating a File List for Phan

Phan is the PHP Analyzer for PHP 7 code. I’ve been using it, partly out of curiosity, and partly to look at what the implications of upgrading my various projects will be. The simplest usage instructions are:

phan -f filelist.txt

I generated my filelist.txt files with a little help from grep – by looking for all files with opening PHP tags in, and putting that list of filenames into a file. My command looks like this:

grep -R -l "<?php" * > filelist.txt

This simply greps recursively (the -R switch) in all files looking for <?php and when it finds it, outputs only the filename (the -l switch does that bit). Then I just put all the output into my filelist.txt file.

Phan is in its early stages but it’s ready for you to run on your own projects. Look out that you may need to put your bootstrap or other include files first in the filelist.txt file if phan isn’t finding things in the right order – luckily with it all in one file, it’s relatively easy to move things around if you need to.

10 Nov
2015

Git Won’t Check Out A Path It Autocompleted

One of my git repositories has developed a tendency to refuse to checkout a feature branch locally that exists on the remote repo. My git bash completion works, but then strange things happen! It turned out to be that I had two remotes with the same refspec, so I thought I’d write down the behaviour I saw and hopefully help someone else to fix this problem faster if they see it. Continue reading →
21 Oct
2015

Why My Open Source Project Needs a Code of Conduct

I’m an open source project maintainer, working on the projects associated with joind.in, and recently we added a Code of Conduct to all our projects (we have quite a few as you can see from our github organisation page https://github.com/joindin).

I feel the same way about codes of conduct for open source projects as I do about codes of conduct for events. You can absolutely run a totally safe and effective event without one, but by having one you make very clear what your expectations are – and in turn this manages the expectations of the people attending that event. Continue reading →

19 Oct
2015

PHP: Calling Methods on Non-Objects

PHP has subtly changed the wording of this error between various versions of the language, which can trip up your log aggregators when you upgrade so I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the changes around the “call to member function on non-object” error in PHP, up to and including PHP 7 which has an entirely new error handling approach. Continue reading →
13 Oct
2015

Ada Lovelace Day: The Allies

It’s Ada Lovelace day, a day when we celebrate women in technology. This year I’d like to mention a group of people who make the biggest difference in the tech life of any minority: the allies. Continue reading →
01 Oct
2015

PHP Learning Path from O’Reilly

I’m very excited to announce that some of my content is featured in the PHP Learning Path from O’Reilly. The Learning Paths are a good way to buy a bundle of content from different people on related topics, and the introductory pricing is always a good deal! Their newest offering is the PHP Learning Path, which has a video course on PHP and MySQL, my intermediate PHP Video course (they wouldn’t let me call it “all the things Lorna thinks PHP developers need to know” unfortunately!) and also my video course Git for Web Developers which has a bunch of PHP in it as well as my best git tips and tricks.

I think it’s a pretty well-rounded collection and it’s only $99 for a couple of weeks, so get the PHP Learning Path here and let me know what you think?

30 Sep
2015

New in PHP 7: null coalesce operator

Not the catchiest name for an operator, but PHP 7 brings in the rather handy null coalesce so I thought I’d share an example.

In PHP 5, we already have a ternary operator, which tests a value, and then returns the second element if that returns true and the third if it doesn’t:

echo $count ? $count : 10; // outputs 10

Continue reading →
25 Sep
2015

Joind.in at the PHPNW Hackathon

It’s PHPNW time again, and that means hackathon! This conference has a strong tradition of hands-on building as well as the usual talks you’d expect to see, and next week will be no exception to that as there’s a hackathon on Friday night before the main conference on Saturday and Sunday. If you’re at the event then make sure you sign up for your hackathon ticket, it’s always a good experience.

Joind.in is one of the featured projects and I’m one of the maintainers, so I’ll be at the hackathon and I’m hoping that we’ll get quite a few things done during the evening. Joind.in is an ideal project for events like this since it’s easy to get started with it, and we have a development platform virtual machine (that we’ll have already downloaded onto USB sticks so no conference wifi delay) so you can be up and running in no time. We also have a specific label on our bug tracker for items that we think are manageable for people who don’t already know the system, so chances are that if you want to, you’ll be able to contribute to an open source project with something finished by the end of the night. Continue reading →

03 Sep
2015

Git Pull Causes a Merge

If you type git pull and expect a fast-forward update, but get a merge instead, don’t panic! This usually happens when we’re collaborating on a branch with other people, and we’ve made changes on our local version of a branch, and someone else (or the other you, if you use git to sync between multiple dev platforms) has made changes to the remote version of a branch in the meantime. It also happens really frequently in teams where all commits are to the master branch … yet another reason to have a decent branching strategy.

All that’s happened is something like this:

$ git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate
* 054f163 (HEAD, branch1) Installation instructions for the application
| * 0ce808c (origin/branch1) Fixing template layout
|/  
* 927aad9 A random change of 731 to ideas2.txt

Since the last common commit, there are commits on your local branch, and the remote one. You could just let the merge go ahead but there are other options. You could also check out a new branch at this point, reset your tracking branch to the right place and then reapply your changes using cherry-pick or by rebasing and then fast-forward merging your branch. Continue reading →

04 Aug
2015

SOAPFault When Switching PHP Versions

I’m working on an update to my PHP Web Services book and with PHP 7 likely to release before the book even makes it into print, I’m testing all my example code across PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 … which today gave me a weird problem with a very, very simple SOAP example. Continue reading →