Articles

Git bisect is a git command that makes it easier to track down where a problem was introduced to a codebase.

In large projects you may find that a change was added to the code that causes a problem and you then need to track down where that problem occurred. Knowing where the problem was introduced makes debugging the issue a lot easier.

You could just checkout commits until you find the culprit, but git comes with the bisect tool that can assist in this process and can even be automated to quickly find the problem.

I quite like the end of the year report from Spotify that they call "Wrapped". This is a little application in which they tell you what your favorite artist was and what sort of genres you listened to the most during the year. It shouldn't come as a surprise to me that I listened to this or that, but since I listen to Spotify around 30-40 hours a week I certainly lose track of what my favorite artist was that year.

This years report got me thinking about how difficult it would be for me to generate my own Spotify report, whenever I wanted. Maybe to see who I had listened to the most during the week, or what sort of genres I was into at the moment.

Last year I was looking through the shop at Mechboards and saw that they had a number of Lily58 R2G (ready to go) kits available. These are kits that have all of the soldering done and are pretty much complete, they just need some switches, keycaps and assembly.

My trusty Keychron K2 has been my daily driver for about 3 years now, so I was looking for something a bit different to type on. I have found that if I try to swap to a keyboard that is similar to the K2 I end up hitting the wrong keys.

Let's say you had a class that you wanted to use, but there was some sort of error in creating the object. This might be that the wrong parameters were passed, or the third party service (eg. a database) wasn't available at the time of creation.

If this happens you'll obviously want to handle the error correctly, but the question is would you throw an exception in the constructor or handle the error condition elsewhere?

Note that this article will talk about PHP, but the same discussion applies to other languages that implement OOP principles.

I was reminded recently about how a GitLab engineer managed to delete the prod database, and that got me thinking about one of my biggest (production) mistakes.

It's been at least 5 years since this happened so I think it's safe to tell the story of when I dropped a production database of one of my clients.

At the time I was working on a (pretty large) Drupal website for an international organization. The site consisted of an extensive content area and allowed users to make anonymous purchases through the website, which were sent to a CRM every night. It was hosted on the Acquia platform and used BLT to perform the day-to-day development operations on the site.

MySQL's slow query log is a key component in your MySQL administration setup. Whilst normal logging can help you in terms of tracking down issues with your database system, the slow query log can help you track down issues in your database setup before they become problematic.

Getting the slow query log set up correctly can help you find and solve issues with slow database queries before they become more problematic. Most slow queries will work fine when there's just a few rows, but as your data grows so will the time taken to find the data. Having the slow query log in place will show these queries and help you do something about them.

Drupal has a quick and convenient way of creating ajax dialogs that gives users the ability to embed links in content that open up dialog boxes when clicked. This is a useful way of presenting a bit of content to a user without them navigating away from the page.

I have previously written in detail about creating ajax dialogs in Drupal, and I refer back to that article quite often when the need arises.

The simplest way of creating an ajax dialog is by adding the class "use-ajax" and the data-dialog-type attribute, which can be one of dialog, dialog.off_canvas, dialog.off_canvas_top and modal. Using the "use-ajax" class tells Drupal that this is an ajax link and to intercept the click to perform an ajax request.

Routes in Drupal can be altered as they are created, or even changed on the fly as the page request is being processed.

In addition to a routing system, Drupal has a path alias system where internal routes like "/node/123" can be given SEO friendly paths like "/about-us". When the user visits the site at "/about-us" the path will be internally re-written to allow Drupal to serve the correct page. Modules like Pathauto will automatically generate the SEO friendly paths using information from the item of content; without the user having to remember to enter it themselves.

 Question

What does the following code print out?

function arrayPrint($array)
{
   echo implode(' ', $array);
}

$arrayA = [1, 2, 3];
$arrayB = $arrayA;
$arrayB[1] = 0;
arrayPrint($arrayA);

Godot is a great game engine and I've been looking for projects to help me expand my knowledge of the platform. After fiddling with drawing shapes and getting used to the interface I decided to create a text adventure game.

Text adventures used to be really popular in the early days of games, before graphical adventures were possible on the hardware available. I can remember playing a couple of adventure games in the late 80s and even playing some simple multi user dungeons (MUDs) in the 90s so text adventure games do have a hint of nostalgia for me.