Category Archives: tech

07 May
2015

Count Changed Lines in Git

I have a favourite set of switches to git log, but today I wanted to answer the question “You deleted how much code today?” so I thought I’d share how I did that

git log --numstat will show you how many lines were added (first column) and removed (next column) per file, kind of a more scientific version of the --stat switch. And if you’re thinking of scripting this to gather stats, try it with --oneline as well, it’s easier to parse.

30 Apr
2015

Scaling and Sizing with PDFJam

I find myself needing to take a PDF, output it at a specific size, and have the result offset to the top right hand side of the screen. To achieve it, I needed a few new switches to my good friend PDFJam, so I thought I’d share my command!

pdfjam --suffix converted --papersize '{1920px,1080px}' --scale 0.4 --trim "-6cm -1cm 13cm 8cm" slides.pdf

The --suffix is instead of giving an output filename, whatever you feed in ends up with the suffix in its filename. This is very handy because I use this command in a script and only need to pass in one variable. The --papersize isn’t a switch I have used before either but you can set exact sizes for the final output which is nice. The --trim switch can also be used to set --clip=true to remove the trimmed space from the document if desired.

I find PDFJam a very handy tool but with not nearly enough blog posts and code snippets around, so I’m dropping my command for future reference (yours as well as mine!).

21 Apr
2015

Vimdiff and Vim to Compare Files

At the moment I’m working on a tricky project where two similar projects diverged. Very similar things happened to them both, but not quite the same things – and now we’re merging the codebases to give us as much common code as possible. All this simply serves to set the scene of exactly what I was doing spending a whole day with large code diffs – I had to look up a few things so I thought I’d capture them while I can remember. Continue reading →
11 Mar
2015

Test Incoming Webhooks Locally with Ngrok

I’m enjoying working with hubot; I have a few different instances running for different groups. One of the things that I use hubot for is to echo activities from the source control repo, the bug tracker, the CI system, the (you get the idea) into the channel for a project. This is achieved via webhooks; a feature offered by many providers to POST information about an event to your endpoint as soon as it happens. Continue reading →
09 Mar
2015

Organising Inclusive Events

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes an inclusive event. Not gender-inclusive, necessarily (I commonly find myself as the only woman developer at both my local user groups), just approachable, maybe for newcomers but mostly for everyone. What happens at the event itself is really important, whether people greet you, whether the speakers introduce themselves, and so on. That’s only half the story though, because often we’ve excluded people from our events before the event begins. Every conversation I have about this topic comes back to information. Continue reading →
03 Mar
2015

Hubot with Git Submodules

I love hubot and use one in a few different places. One thing I do find though is that I often want to edit or evolve those plugins, and it seems somehow unethical to just hardcode my changes into my own repo. Once I figured out how to wire together a forked repo as a submodule, it became much easier to work with hubots with external plugins, so I thought I’d share my recipe for that. Continue reading →
11 Feb
2015

Git: upstream is gone

I came across a git repo recently that output this message with every operation I did:

Your branch is based on 'origin/master', but the upstream is gone.
  (use "git branch --unset-upstream" to fixup)

I was delivering a workshop at the time so I kinda snarled at it and carried on with what I was doing, but later I looked up what is happening. This occurs when a branch is tracking a branch that the git repo doesn’t have any information about – the branches to be tracked aren’t in the local repo metadata.

In my case, it happened because I had created and then cloned an empty repo for training purposes – so origin/master didn’t actually exist yet! I added a quick commit-and-push to my script and hope that I won’t be upstaged by this change that came in with git 1.8.5.

Hopefully this post will help someone else to avoid being upstaged or irritated by this as well!

05 Feb
2015

5 Reasons to Consider Upgrading Your PHP Platform

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. Continue reading →