CI/CD GitLab CI - Minimum requirements for PHPUnit I do most of my coding in PHP. Always have, likely always will. Yes, I dabble in other technology, but I am getting to a point where I spend more
CI/CD Fixing GitLab pipeline stuck on tzdata configuration Are your pipelines stuck forever waiting one one job to finish? Does that job always time out? And in the console output for that job, is it stuck at the
Development NPM del task forgets to signal async completion As part of my development workflow, I use gulp to build the Javascript and CSS files for production. To ensure that the files are removed and replaced, rather than any
Security Remove unused plugins I've previously covered the issues of using a CMS, and that they require a lot of work to keep up-to-date. But sometimes that isn't enough. Part of the updating of
Development Why you should use custom exceptions Anyone who has done any real coding is likely to have seen an exception message, and/or a stack trace which comes with it. It's usually a whole load of
Hardware Why a MacBook might be the perfect development device Let me start by saying I'm not a fan of Apple. I don't own a single Apple device, and the only Apple device I have ever owned is an iPod.
Security Cula.io limiting password lengths Following my post on why passwords shouldn't be limited in length, I have decided to name and shame some services as I find them when they limit password lengths. The
Security Disk space is cheap, data breaches are not! Many, many years ago (way back in 2015), I wrote an article about keeping data secure. A few things have changed since then, most notably the introduction of GDPR in
User Experience User Experience? Consider your users User Experience (UX) is something which has been around for a while. It is becoming more and more prevalent and "buzzwordy" as more people get more technology. Unfortunately, there's still
Raspberry Pi Installing Pi Hole on Ubuntu Following the use of a Raspberry Pi for my backups, I decided to go ahead and install Pi Hole on the same device. I've got nothing against content creators making
Backups Raspberry Pi for Backups with IDrive I've previously written about my backups, the server they were running from, and the NAS drive problems i have had. I've also had issues getting the backups up to the
Backups Commits are your backup If you are a software developer of any sort, you really should use source control. It doesn't matter if it's for personal or professional projects (but definitely for the latter)
Apache How to fix the Symfony web profiler in Apache So you've decided you want to create a web project using Symfony 5. Great! By now you've got the Welcome to Symfony 5.x.y message on screen; great. You're
Hardware Not all developers need a 4K monitor This is going to be controversial. And for those developers who's managers read this post and decline their, likely legitimate, request for a 4K screen, I apologise. But, not all
Recruitment Writing a good technical test Having previously defended technical tests, I started thinking about what makes a good tech test. It's also made me review the tech tests I issue to follow these guidelines. Writing
Development Why you should use Virtual Machines in development I've previously covered why I use Ubuntu, even at my day job where I have a Windows laptop I spend most of my time using Ubuntu. This is through virtual
Linux Why I use Ubuntu I use Ubuntu Linux. That much is clear from the title. It confuses some people as to why I would; and others have no idea what I am on about
Development In defence of technical tests I've just undergone a round of recruitment to expand my team at work. We're a small, steadily growing team. But when we hire someone, I want to understand their thought
Symfony Symfony unit tests with Redis on GitLab I've written a few times about GitLab and the CI/CD pipeline features it has. For most cases, it's straightforward to use. But, every so often, things don't always work
Why should you blog? There are millions of blogs out there. Literally. But there should always be more. It might be seen as filling the Internet with junk, and but I think everyone should
Security Clear out unused apps for security It's that time of year when we undertake a spring clean of our homes ready for the year ahead. Throw out the unused junk, and generally keep things tidy. This
Apache How to configure your CI pipeline environments This seems like a very simple and trivial thing, but it's something which gets easily overlooked. Setting up a CI pipeline environment is fairly trivial (unless you are using a
CI/CD Test your deployment tasks The great part of a CI/CD pipeline is the headache which can be removed from deployments. Manual deployments are painful, but deployments as a whole don't need to be.
Development Doctrine DBAL and the LIKE operator Doctrine is a great abstraction layer, and I've resolved to use it more and more through my projects to keep things simple and maintainable. The problem is, the documentation isn't
