Published: 2019 July 23
When working with contributing to open-source software, one typically works from a forked repository of the original repository. Depending on the frequency of updates to the original repository, it is very easy for both repositories to become out-of-sync…
Read more...Published: 2018 October 23
Yesterday, we started our second "hackathon" at work. We divided up into teams of 3 of various skill sets with the goal of building something that would benefit the organization, the overall project, and/or the team. My team wants to create automated…
Read more...Published: 2018 October 02
The time of Hacktoberfest is upon us! For the entire month of October, every pull request against an open-source repository on Github will count towards one's Hactoberfest rank. Submit at least 5 pull requests and you are eligible to earn a cool t-shirt…
Read more...Published: 2018 October 01
I'm very excited. I will be mentoring now- and future- lady devs at Rails Girls KC in early November. My 14-year old daughter will be one of the participants, too! In 1.5 days, the participants will build a simple application using Ruby on Rails. Although…
Read more...Published: 2018 September 17
As I build this site using gatsbyjs, I find myself learning new things every day. Today, I learned that, much like siblings on a road-trip, React components hate sitting next to each other. When placing components next to each other, it's best to use a…
Read more...Published: 2018 September 09
On July 2nd of this year, I discovered an amazing option that lets me see the git-diff between what I currently have and what is in the stash: . Shortly thereafter, Brian Fenton directed me to a great article on , Useful tricks you might not know about…
Read more...Published: 2018 September 06
A coworker sent me a screen-grab of a forum post where someone stated that they used an experimental Docker image that I had built to help them with their local dev work. I don't even remember how to make that Docker image work for local dev and the build…
Read more...Published: 2018 September 03
I had been searching for a new static-site generator for some time. I was delving into Grav, which is more of a flat-file CMS than a static-site generator and is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn't make Grav work for my needs. One of the things that…
Read more...Published: 2016 April 04
From a KCPUG lightning talk being given on 06 Apr 2016. BASH COMING TO WINDOWS! Yes, Microsoft is adding the linux Bash shell to Windows. Uses Ubuntu user mode binaries So, (maybe?) in the Windows Command Line: PHP development on Windows is about to get…
Read more...Published: 2016 March 19
From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 02 Mar 2016 PHP Updates Security and bugfix updates to PHP were released in February. Upgrade if you have a version less than: 7.0.3 Added HTTP 451 5.6.18 Added HTTP 451 5.5.32 CMSes Drupal released security updates…
Read more...Published: 2016 February 06
From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 03 Feb 2016 January was a relatively light month in PHP. Yet, we saw an exciting new microframework get its first non-beta release. PHP Updates Security and bugfix updates to PHP were released in January. Upgrade if you…
Read more...Published: 2016 January 26
In my current job, I am starting the process to upgrade our PHP 5.4 application to a PHP 5.6 application (PHP 7 is not yet support by the majority of the 3rd party libraries we use). I have been tasked with building the staging server for use in testing…
Read more...Published: 2016 January 06
From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 06 Jan 2016 December was a busy month in PHP. A major update to PHP was released, PHP-FIG approved a new PSR, major CMSes had major releases and/or were patched, and frameworks had major, minor, and patch releases. PHP…
Read more...Published: 2015 November 29
I have been a professional developer for over a year and a half now. About a year ago, my friend and mentor, John Kary, asked me how the job measured up to my expectations. I replied, honestly, that my expectations were met. However, I hadn't given it much…
Read more...Published: 2015 November 13
2015 was my year to really dive into PHP. Up until this year, PHP was hobby language for me -- much as Python, Haskell, C++, Dart, JavaScript, and Java have been hobby languages. Granted, last year I finally took a job where PHP is where I spend half of my…
Read more...Published: 2015 November 01
My 6th grader asked me this evening about the classic novel, Don Quixote. "Like, what's it about, Dad?" I gave her a synopsis she could identify: Miguel Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in Spanish at the same time Shakespeare was writing his plays in English…
Read more...Published: 2015 August 13
The "switch" statement within various languages, contains a similar structure. This makes the PHP switch statement familiar. A failing example of PHP's switch statement was brought up yesterday at work. Someone asked why the expected responses to this were…
Read more...Published: 2015 August 12
a fresh dough nut glazed with maple icing beside the black coffee.
Read more...Published: 2015 July 16
Introduction I have been thinking about numbers for most of my life. It wasn't until I helped my oldest child learn to count to 20 that I thought that the way we count in the English language is silly. There is no logic in our base-10 counting system until…
Read more...Published: 2015 July 08
I was studying the in PHP and was enjoying coming up with a test that could help me learn better magic. For instance, to filter all words whose first letter is a vowel, I created this PHPUnit test: So, yay ! But wait, what's this? There's an optional…
Read more...Published: 2015 May 12
The LCHF diet can be summarized as follows: "The fat you eat flows through; the fat you make sticks to you."
Read more...Published: 2015 May 08
On Wednesday, I took an extended lunch break in order to take the Zend PHP Certification test at a local Pearson VUE Testing Center. After a few years of using PHP and studying for a few months, I am a Zend Certified PHP Engineer! Books that have helped me…
Read more...Published: 2015 May 05
Today is the unofficial Star-Wars-fan holiday known as the Revenge of the Fifth. Last year, I noticed that 5/5 (numerical representation of 5 May, or is that May 5?) can be written in binary as . Or more artistically as:
Read more...Published: 2015 April 28
I attended Lone Star PHP last year with much hope and even more trepidation as to my abilities to hold my own with other members of the PHP community. I was the recipient of the Lone Star PHP scholarship, so my attendance and stay were taken care of by the…
Read more...Published: 2015 April 27
The first day of Lone Star 2015 was devoted to training. The workshop track I took was geared towards unit testing. Getting Started with PHPUnit Matt Frost Twitter: @shrtwhitebldguy Slides One reason I took this workshop was so that I could become more…
Read more...Published: 2015 April 23
Heredoc Heredoc will define a string of text in a what-you-see-is-what-you-mean type of format. So, if you want to echo out structured text, like so: You would put it in a heredoc like this: output: Notice that heredoc can behave like a template and parse…
Read more...Published: 2015 March 04
In PHP, we have two ways of formatting an echo statement: we can choose to use single-quotes or double-quotes. The choice is less dependent upon which side of the Atlantic we learned to read and more dependent upon what we hope to accomplish with echoing…
Read more...Published: 2014 December 28
I have moved my site from one domain to another. I was using Wordpress on my old site and was happy. Adding pages was a thing of beauty. Configuring was a dream. Then I wanted to modify my theme. Then I wanted to use some fun HTML5 tags. Then I wanted to…
Read more...Published: 2014 December 22
Kata Kata are a series of movements which, when repeated, migrate mindful action into muscle memory. An example kata is performed by Rika Usami of Japan during the 2012 World Karate Championship in Paris. Kata can be thought of in terms of playing an…
Read more...Published: 2014 August 15
I was recently talking with a non-programmer friend of mine about teaching our kids how to code. I told him about my long and winding road to loving programming. He told me that he just doesn’t get how anything so tedious as programming can hold anyone’s…
Read more...Published: 2014 July 28
We hired a new guy at work. I was officially the new guy for 2 months, now we have someone new. I was given the task to get him up and running since the experience was still fresh for me. Once he got his dev environment going, he would look over my…
Read more...Published: 2014 May 28
I recently had the opportunity to take my love of programming from being a hobby to being a career. I jumped at the chance. I am now in my 3rd week of the new job and have yet to go to work. Instead, I meet up with fellow nerds and geek out on programming…
Read more...Published: 2014 May 06
I was fortunate to receive a scholarship to attend the 2014 Lone Star PHP Conference in Addison, TX (Dallas metro area) over the April last weekend in April. I just had to get myself there. Thank you, Lone Star PHP and NomadPHP! I enjoyed meeting some of…
Read more...Published: 2014 April 08
Last week, I gave a short demo of the Atom.io text editor to the Kansas City PHP User Group. I realized after-the-fact that I had presented the early-release as an IDE, when I should have presented it as a fancy text-editor. Coming from using PHPStorm as…
Read more...Published: 2014 April 08
For years, I have prided myself on knowing how to set up a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) server in linux OSes based on Debian, RedHat, and SuSE. Today, I needed to set up an internal-use survey server using LimeSurvey. I decided to build as…
Read more...Published: 2014 April 07
After studying Dart for a month, I wondered which problems Dart was attempting to resolve. I then realized that my knowledge of JavaScript was not good enough to know why Google had created Dart as a JavaScript alternative. As much as I enjoyed Dart, I…
Read more...Published: 2014 March 03
I am currently feeling a bit of push and pull between at least two different decisions. I have a “when you have time for it” project that I am thinking of building in Laravel. I am also interested in learning more about the Dart language with Dart’s…
Read more...Published: 2014 February 20
This evening, I attended the Dart Flight School at the Google Fiber Space in Kansas City. Dart Flight School is a global event occurring throughout February. I treated this event as an introduction to the Dart programming language. I walked in to the event…
Read more...Published: 2014 February 14
Background I was recently tasked with programming a connecty-bit between a Google Drive Form and our instance of SolarWinds Web Help Desk. Both are great products. Both offer fabulous APIs. My overall plan was to periodically grab all information from the…
Read more...Published: 2011 October 01
On page 7 of Learning Python (4th ed), Mark Lutz briefly discusses the speed differences between Python and compiled languages like C++. I was curious as to how much slower an interpreted language is than a compiled language. To illustrate this, I whipped…
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