Deployer is a PHP based deployment tool that I have been using very successfully for a number of months now. It comes with a number of different recipes to deploy a variety of PHP based applications, including Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Drupal.

I first found Deployer when looking for a deployment package that suited my needs. Phing had been my tool of choice for a number of years, but it had proved problematic trying to debug the XML syntax when things needed tweaking. As I was deploying PHP applications it made sense to me to use a PHP based system to do the deployment. I looked at tools like Capistrano, but as I wasn't that familiar with Ruby I was worried that I wouldn't be able to debug mistakes or customise the deployment process easily.

Having a chat feature on your website (commonly called 'live chat') is useful when helping your users overcome any difficulties they are having. You can pop up a little chat window in the page and ask if they need any help finding what they need. This can be especially useful on large commerce sites where users might get stuck looking for things.

The addition of a chatbot also allows you to automatically answer some of more common questions. For example, if a user asks where they can find the delivery and returns policy then a chatbot can automatically respond with a response. These rules can get more complicated, but it depends on what you instruct the bot to answer to.

The other day I was trying to print some output to the command line and then overwrite the output afterwards. It turns out that there are a couple of ways to do this so I thought I would detail a few of them here.

By far the simplest way of doing this is to run the "clear" command, which we can run via the system() function in PHP. This will clear the output of the command line ready for you to print out whatever you need. The downside to this is that the entire terminal window is cleared. Another downside is that once the output is complete scrolling up will reveal the output that was cleared out.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of the Mathematician John Horton Conway today so I decided to put together a post on his 'game of life' simulator.

This game of life, more commonly called Conway's game of life, was devised by John Conway in 1970 and is a way of modelling very simple cell population dynamics. The game takes place on a two dimensional board containing a grid of orthogonal cells. The game is technically a zero player game in that the initial setup of the game dictates the eventual evolution of the board.

The rules of the game (taken from wikipedia) are as follows.

Creating branches in git basically free and is easy to do. This has lead to the development of techniques like git flow and other branch related work streams, which are now commonplace in development.

If you have a project being worked on by many developers you can get into the situation where there are many branches in the project. Some will be merged, some will be worked on currently and some more will be branches that were worked on, but never finished (for one reason or another). This can lead to some confusion over what branches are being worked on, especially if you want an oversight on the current health of the project.

Drupal Views is a great way of exposing data to users via a search interface. This can be done directly via the database or via a Solr server. Plenty of Views plugins exist to allow reacting to the search input and output in a variety of different ways.

The other day I needed to add a personalised message to Views output to inform a user that their search keyword didn't find any results. There is a plugin for Views that allows this, but it only shows a basic search string.

What I needed was a way to print out the following block of HTML, containing the search term that the user searched for.

DrupalCamp London was held on the 14th and 15th March 2020 and I went down to City University London to partake in the event. I wasn't talking this year, so I was there purely to enjoy the conference.

Upon a recommendation from someone in my local Drupal user group I decided to give Tailwind CSS a go. The ultimate aim of this was to replace the base theme I am using here with a more stripped down theme. At the time of writing this I am using the Cog theme, and whilst it has it's merits, I find that it's a little too much for this simple site.

I decided, therefore, to create a new theme and use Tailwind CSS to alter the site a little. This meant an exercise in integrating Tailwind CSS into a Drupal theme.

Tailwind CSS?

In case you haven't heard of Tailwind CSS I'll quote the site here.

"Tailwind CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."

Tests for programmers in an interview process are not uncommon. For the last couple of years I have asked a quick pre-interview question to junior developers to see what sort of stuff they come up with.

As I don't want to set any developer a task that will take longer than absolutely needed I opted to set a very simple task for them. Commonly known as "FizzBuzz", this task is as follows.

"Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz"."

The expected output for this would be something like this.

One technique I find useful, especially when drawing images, is to invert a number on a scale. In PHP, coordinates in an image are drawn from the top left of the image. This means that if we want to draw from the bottom left then we need to invert the y coordinate.

The following is example PHP code that creates an image with a single, diagonal line, drawn across the middle.