Starting with Symfony – Performance issues

When I chose Symfony, I did so on the understanding that it was going to be a relatively lightweight, performance framework which I could use to build web apps which scale nicely and respond quickly. I started out with a tutorial where the first activity was to get the name of a person input via the GET request in the URL, and display it on screen. Simple enough – can be developed incredibly quickly and be a non-issue for performance. Not so much…


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Getting Started with Symfony (part 1)

I’m about to make a change in my career and go back into development. To help me do that I’ve started a course on Udemy for getting up and running with Symfony 4. I figured that if I was going to be working with frameworks, I might as well get used to them.


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Jenkins disk space usage

I’m working on a project, part time, in my spare time.  As part of that project I have Jenkins for continual building when I publish anything into the master branch in git.  I’ve not done much for a month or so, but logged in to it today to be given a lovely warning that the disk space is nearly full.

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My First Attempt at Open-Source Contribution

I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open source project, so I thought it was time to finally start.  I’ve been investigating different CSS frameworks, and came across Bulma.  I saw the contribute link and figured I’d see what issues there were in Github for it, and there was an issue about some typos.  I figured that was a good place to start; check if any more remained.  I forked and clones the repo to my machine and blasted it through “Inspect Code” option in PhpStorm, but found a different issue to look into, a one not raised currently as an issue, but still as part of the title.sass file.  It was to do with the following on line 14:

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Automating the simple stuff

We all use computers for one thing or another, and in most cases we’ll do the same things on them over and over.  Part of being a developer is realising the things which need doing a lot, and automating them to increase productivity.  Doesn’t matter what it is, there’s generally a way to automate things.

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Encrypting the site

I’ve just moved my site from HTTP over to HTTPS.  It’s not a huge deal for something like this, but it’s something which I’ve really needed to do for a while, and something which is becoming more and more popular.  For most people this won’t mean much, and for this site it doesn’t amke much difference, but given that encrypting web pages is a simple process, there’s no real reason not to be doing it.

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Introducing Charon File Uploader

I’ve wanted to build a useful javascript library for a while, but never found any of the ones out there lacking.  I’ve been working on a new project recently and one of the things I needed to do for that was be able to upload an image via AJAX, along with the alt-text and other information for the image.  There’s libraries out there for uploading files and images, but I’ve not found one which lets you add other information to the post easily.  That’s when I figured I could build it myself.  Charon was born!

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Database Connection Mis-information

Whilst on my usual rounds on StackOverflow to help spred useful knowledge of computing and web development I came across the following comments on a thread:

Um… mysql doesn’t connect over http… nor to a directory

Neither should it be an url. Usually it’s localhost or the IP address of the remote mysql server

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Check, test and check again

I noticed today as I was about to start a different article that my website was looking a bit, well, funny.  The layout was wrong, some of the colours were off, the whole thing was a mess.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not at the forefront of design, and won’t win any beauty awards, but it looked awful!

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Joomla 3.5.1 released

Joomla has announced the release of their open source CMS system, version v3.5.1.  The latest version fixes the following issues which were found in v3.5:

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