Category Archives: tech

03 Jul
2014

Video: Git Remotes and Tracking Branches

Here’s a little demo video that I put together to explain pushing/pulling with multiple remotes and how tracking branches make this easier. It’s one of the chapters from my “Git Adventures” talk, but it didn’t make it in to the talk in Amsterdam last week since we chose a different adventure that time – sharing it here in case it’s helpful to anyone else, and so I can find it later!

I also blogged about the tracking branches in a bit more detail if you’re interested.

03 Jul
2014

Understanding Tracking Branches in Git

Here’s a topic that took me a while to understand in git, and now (I think!) I do, I thought I’d write it all down while I can remember!

Some branches in git (such as your origin/master branch) will usually track the remote branch that they are related to. But what if you want to create a relationship between local and remote branches? Or stop them from tracking? Here’s some pointers Continue reading →

01 Jul
2014

Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins

The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don’t have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I’ve had a few questions about the setup so I thought I’d share how it works. Continue reading →
12 Jun
2014

What Got You Involved in Open Source?

I did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I’d loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed. Continue reading →
02 Jun
2014

Colourless Git Output

I teach git and often have issues with bad projectors where you can’t see the colours. Recently I had a setup where even white on black was more or less invisible, but using black text on a white background worked okay. There’s lots of documentation on how to turn on colours in git but not so much about how to turn them off.

Try putting the following into .git/config:

[color]
    branch = false
    diff = false
    interactive = false
    status = false

I had expected to be able to set color.ui to false but that didn’t seem to make much difference, so I now use the settings above. I thought I’d drop it here in case anyone else is looking for the same thing.

13 May
2014

Easy Lint Check for JavaScript

I’m introducing lint checking on one of my projects, because it didn’t have a build process yet and I love this as a great place to start. Oh, and because we managed to commit broken syntax! So I set up a php lint job (I will share my travis config in another post) and tried to work out doing the same thing for JavaScript. Continue reading →
02 Apr
2014

Copy/Pasting and Vim

I’m a vim user and I somehow completely missed this excellent feature until much more recently than I care to admit! Usually vim has its own clipboard, but it doesn’t share with the operating system. You will need a vim-gtk install, this isn’t available in really basic vim (I’m a little unclear exactly on the dependencies).

To paste between vim and something else, use the + (plus) buffer in vim. It contains the contents of your system clipboard, and you can also write to it. If you’re not already using buffers in vim, then you should probably read the excellent documentation but for a very quick start:

  • To copy something into the buffer, select it in visual mode and type "+y
  • To paste from the buffer, type "+P

I had no idea how I’d missed this really fundamental trick, so I thought I’d share!

31 Mar
2014

Quick Switch Between Git Branches

Today’s little-known git feature (or maybe everyone knows but me? I only found this a few months ago) is for quickly switching between branches. Usually I would switch branches with:

git checkout [branchname]

However if you switch from one branch to another and want to switch back again (this happens when I’m reviewing changes and wondering if a bug is present on master as well), then you can do so by just doing:

git checkout -

Just a little timesaver in case it’s useful to anyone else – I know I’ve been using it quite a bit!

25 Mar
2014

Wireshark Capture on Remote Server

The joind.in project uses a really nice vagrant setup for its dev platform – which is much needed these days as we move away from a single LAMP stack install to a website plus another website, which talks to an API and caches in redis and deploys with …. you get the picture :) This is great but having everything on the VM can make it a bit trickier to debug what’s going on – and with a website that talks to an API that talks to MySQL, that all lives on a VM with port forwards, you can see the problem :)

To get an insight into the traffic going around the place, I’ve been using Wireshark and it’s ability to capture remotely, it’s really simple so I thought I’d write down my “recipe” on how to do this in case it’s useful. Continue reading →

05 Mar
2014

What Does URI Stand For?

I get a lot of complaints about an API that I maintain (http://api.joind.in) which is “missing” the ID field. This ID field is the database’s primary key; if the user doesn’t have access to the database (they don’t), then it seems to me that the primary key probably isn’t all that useful.

Instead, the API publishes each record with a unique uri field. If this record is referred to by another record, then this full identifier will be used in every case. If this record should be included in a collection, this exact same identifier will be used there, too. You can reach the resource directly by requesting its URI. In the same way that we might refer to a website by its URL, we refer to records in RESTful systems by their URI*. If you need to store these somewhere for your own use, you can use whatever key you like with the local storage, you may even choose to use the uri field as it is unique.

* URI stands for Unique Resource Identifier