Author Archives: lornajane

16 Dec
2014

ZCE Questions Pack Unavailable

There is a change in legislation for selling digital goods to anyone in the EU, and to cut a long story short this means that my ZCE Questions Pack will be unavailable at least in the short term. The pack is intended for anyone preparing for ZCE, it has general advice, sample questions and detailed answers and resources covering all the topics you will encounter at ZCE.

However from January the VAT rules change and I’m not in a position to comply with the new rules (they would cost a lot more than the sales make). I’m looking for alternative sales channels that would enable me to keep making the pack available but those won’t be in place immediately. If you are studying for ZCE over the Christmas break, please make sure you have the pack well in advance!

Edit: Pack temporarily unavailable now

I have other (free!) resources for you also on my ZCE page. If you have an earlier version of this pack, email me your receipt and I’ll send you a new copy – but again, you have about a week to do it!

09 Dec
2014

Status Check on All Vagrant Machines

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 up machines and then forgetting about them!

It turns out that (since vagrant 1.6) you can ask vagrant to tell you which of its machines are running, using the command:

vagrant global-status

Where did all my system resources go? Now I know!

04 Dec
2014

Vim and HTML Tags with the Surround Plugin

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.
Continue reading →
17 Nov
2014

New Job With Siftware

After 4 years of working independently, today I start my new job! I’ll be Principal Developer with Siftware, a small development agency specialising in project rescue, migrations, and generally being excellent at things that need business-conscious development skills applied to them. They’re UK-based but distributed; I will still work mostly remotely. This is also a part-time role so I’ll be using the other half of the week to continue with my books/consultancy/training/outreach/whatever activities – really this “big news” isn’t much of a lifestyle change! I’ve been doing about 50% development and 50% other for the last year or so, and I’ll continue to offer training and specialist consultancy services for anyone with an interesting enough challenge for me.

In fact this is my dream job. Steady, REAL development work, with real people in my timezone. Part time to allow the other aspects of my business to still get some time and attention, and to fit in my other interests/family commitments. Too good to be true? I hope not :)

21 Oct
2014

Announcing the Git Workbook

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. Continue reading →

15 Oct
2014

Git Submodules for Dependent or Common Code

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. Continue reading →
14 Oct
2014

Ada Lovelace Day: The Women Who Share My Journey

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. Continue reading →

09 Oct
2014

How to Choose PHP Hosting

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting. Continue reading →
29 Sep
2014

Install CharlesProxy CA Certificate on Android

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. Continue reading →

25 Sep
2014

Joind.in at PHPNW’s Hackathon

With a week to go, everyone attending PHPNW is starting to get excited. One of my highlights of the weekend is always the hackathon; as an open source project lead it’s fantastic to meet new contributors and get a chance to hack in person with them and the more established people from the project.

This year will be no exception: PHPNW’s Hackathon is on the Friday evening – you need a conference ticket, and you need to tick the “hackathon ticket” box. Joind.in will be there and we’ve got a very big todo list so if you are looking for something to hack on, then look no further! Continue reading →