Creating a good resume isn’t too difficult, but it can significantly increase your chances of getting through the screening process. Resumes are your first obstacle to getting that exciting new job opportunity, but it’s a fairly easy obstacle to overcome with a bit of work. Check the right boxes, and you’ll be doing an interview […]
Tips & Tricks
If you use bash colors, check for a tty first!
Most of the command line programs I write use ANSI escape codes to output colored text (along with bold/underlined text). I find this makes the programs a lot easier to understand at a glance. For example, my test runners will output success in green, skipped in yellow, and failure in red. I can very quickly […]
Long running PHP script gotcha
So I was recently answering a question on StackOverflow, and learned something quite interesting about PHP. This particular aspect of PHP mostly affects long running scripts, such as PHP based servers or daemons. PHP does not re-use resource ids internally, so eventually your script could run into an error with the resource ID overflows and […]
Node Tip: .nodemonignore
Most node.js developers use Nodemon as a development server, as it allows you to watch your project files and will automatically restart Node when changes are detected. However, there are a few problems with this. Restarting an application every time a file changes is often unnecessary, and causes a slight delay before you can refresh […]
Git Tip: No History
If you’re using Git to install some piece of software, such as phpMyAdmin or WordPress, here’s a tip: Don’t get the history when you clone the repository! phpMyAdmin has 10,000+ commits for instance, and you don’t need that. Use the following command to only download the latest source: git clone –depth 1 https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin.git And here’s […]
Node Tip: require() JSON files
If you didn’t already know this, it may come in handy. You can use Node’s require() function to require JSON files. It will return a hash. Just like require() always does, it will cache the file, and only load it once (no matter how many files you require it from). Useful for config files. var […]
phpMyAdmin woes
I use phpMyAdmin for managing many of my databases, as it’s quick and easy to setup, and I don’t have to enable Internet access to the MySQL server (directly anyways). I use it in both development & production, which brings up an interesting problem. I often have multiple PMA tabs open at one time, and […]
WordPress Must-Use Plugins
At this point in time, WordPress remains the easiest-to-use “CMS” available to us, so I end up developing quite a few sites with it. Somehow, there is this great feature I’ve never heard of until a few weeks back, so I thought I’d share with the class. WordPress has this feature called “Must Use Plugins“, […]
Writing nicer console scripts
Recently I working on a web application for a client over at my new company, Spark Creek. The particular component I was building was an import script, runnable via the command line. It was written in PHP, as a bundle for Symfony. At first, I built the script to output progress like “Matched 50 URLs […]
The power of session_write_close()
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably created an infinite loop or two in your day. One misconception that I had however, was that a single script that entered an infinite loop was causing my entire server to get locked up, because I couldn’t reload the page or load any other page. I always just […]