Development and Technology

Gary Bell

Test your deployment tasks

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. Automating deployments is a great way to avoid human error, and to be able to deploy with consistent

Doctrine DBAL and the LIKE operator

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 always great for it. Take the below image as an example of the documentation for the

Replacing a drive in Buffalo LS441D after a drive failure

Replacing a drive in Buffalo LS441D after a drive failure

I mentioned back in August that I'd changed my backups [https://www.garybell.co.uk/changing-my-backups/]to use a NAS enclosure rather than a full blown server. I'm glad I did, as I recently suffered a drive failure on the NAS which, if it had happened

Fixing Magento Invalid attribute name issue after SUPEE-11219

Fixing Magento Invalid attribute name issue after SUPEE-11219

Having recently updated a Magento installation to apply SUPEE-11219, there were issues when searching for products using the filters for the grid. I had an error message of: > Invalid attribute name: blcg_custom_field_2 The only reference to 'blcg_custom_field_' was a constant: const GRID_

Magento patching frustrations

I've previously covered the issues I have with CMS platforms [https://www.garybell.co.uk/issues-with-using-a-cms/]. They aren't bad (I use one for this blog), however some seem to want to make it as difficult as possible to update. I currently use Magento as part of

HTTP status codes and their uses

We all know about HTTP codes, or at least we know there is a 404 one which means not found. Some of us know that there's a 200 code (meaning OK), and that there's some odd ones in the 500 meaning something went bang! Those interested

Changing my backups

Changing my backups

It's been a long time since I turned my old PC into a home media server [https://www.garybell.co.uk/home-media-server-samba-configuration/], but time has come for that machine and some of its components, so it's time it retired with grace. Fortunately the main issues are