In this guide, I’ll walk through setting up a brand new Django project with the awesome Poetry dependency manager for Python.

Poetry

Poetry is a dependency...

A new role meant a change of language. After 3 years working with Ruby on Rails, and prior to that with PHP, I find myself working with a Python/Django...

I was recently working on a project where the initial mockups were all built using Twig and a light weight Silex backend, but the actual application was built in Yii2. Rather than rebuild all the UI as Yii2 views, I looked into utilising the Twig elements I already had. It was a lot easier than I hoped to integrate Twig into Yii2 and I didn’t loose out on any of Yii2’s powerful view features.

I do a lot of development, and pretty much run everything locally using Vagrant. For basic stuff http://localhost:3000 is fine, but what happens when I need lots of sub domains or multiple VM’s running… here’s my journey to solving this problem and some of the suggestions I came across.

I’ve been doing a lot of data clean up recently and writing quick Ruby tools that parse array’s of data hashes to produce SQL statements that can be...

Today I had to set up a secure dropbox for some of our customers to deliver files to us via FTP over an SSH tunnel. However we didn’t want to just dish...

Wow… its been a while since I’ve written anything on here. Christmas was time out with the family and then the year started with a big project, but...

Hubot from Github is a great tool for both fun and automation. We trialled it along side our HipChat trial by installing it onto a free Heroku instance...

A while ago I was involved in a project that wanted to convert a legacy CakePHP (v1.3) app into a Rails app. One of the problems we had to solve was...

At work our big enterprise system generates a metric tonne of log files from various parts of the system. These can easily run to hundreds of megabytes...

On Monday 4th November 2013, the newly formed PHP Dorset user group met for the first time. We have been referring to this as our 0th meet as originally...

Over the last year I’ve gradually pushed myself towards Vim and can now say I’m a complete convert. I generally live inside Vim as much as possible...

The second part of an experimental CakePHP asset stragtegy loosely based on the Rails asset pipeline. Part 1 can be found here.

An apology

What can...

PHPNW kicked off the weekend with a tutorial session on Friday. This was a great way to get a deeper look at some topics in a smaller group with more...

This is just a short reminder on setting up aliases for SSH, making it easier to connect to remote hosts you frequently use, and to be able to customise...

The CentOS yum repositories only have Vim 7.2 available for install, however there are a number of bug fixes and new features in the 7.3+ versions that...

Original

First off, I want to make sure that the original talks gets its due. You can watch it with slides on Pro Talk or via YouTube right here ...

A little while ago I wrote about using environment variables to store various sensitive information in your application without revealing it in source...

Sometimes you need to use a non-standard password hashing algorithm with the CakePHP Auth component. In the 2.3.x branch, you need to write a custom...

A friend recently tipped me off about Gource, a neat tool for creating amazing visualisations of source code changes through out the lifetime of a project...

This is the first part in my Asset Strategy series. Read the second part here..

Introduction

I’ve always hated how the css/ and js/ directories of...

Yesterday I had my first go at using the canvas element and some Javascript to draw dynamic graphics in a web app. What follows are my notes from the...

CakePHP behaviours are great. They’re kind of like Ruby’s mixins with a splash of the observer thrown in.

They are specifically for the model, and...

One of the things to be careful of in CakePHP development is the minor differences between these 2 methods and what they actually do.

The key thing...

Now first off, I know full well that only giving Vim a week is crazy. This tool can take people years to master properly so to only give it a week...

This weekend I attended Ruby Manor, a community driven conference, and while it is targeted at the Ruby community, the chosen talks covered an eclectic...

While I have made my career over the last decade mostly based on PHP programming, its weird and sometimes outright insane gotcha’s still get me on a...

I write most, if not all, of my client side code in Coffeescript now. While thats fine in Rails, which has a great asset management system, in other...

It should be common knowledge that you never put sensitive information into source control, but recently its been shown that many developers leave paswords...

There are plenty of posts around the internet that detail how to install Postgresql, however I recently had a hell of a time getting it running on...

Just the other day I needed to find out if we were messing around with some code in our codebase at a certain date where a bug appears to have been...

A little tip on getting PHP 5.4 installed on the latest OSX.

OSX ML ships with PHP 5.3 installed but the latest version is now on 5.4.

I’m a big fan...

This is a task I add to my capistrano recipes to ensure that the branch being deployed is always pushed to the remote prior to deploy

task :push do

I use Git Flow and Capistrano Multistage to manage deployment of my web apps, which means I can be deploying lots of different branches to our test...

I only just came across this the other day, so other people using Ruby, at least those new to it, may not know this either.

What’s irb? (Just in case...

Every time I come to format a date as a string in Ruby I spend 10 minutes looking up the tokens to get the formatting right. They just don’t seem to...

Normally all the validation rules are stored in the model class in the validate var

<?php
public $validate = array();

However, sometimes you need to...

One of the things some people don’t know to do when they grab an open source Ruby on Rails app from Github (or elsewhere) is to change the secret token...

There are all sorts of ways you could set up a sitemap for your rails 3.1 application.

If you want to add urls dynamically, from blog posts for example...

Sometimes an action or link needs to take the user back to where they came from each time rather than to an explicit location. When this happens CakePHP...

This may seem like a pretty unlikely situation, but occasionally you may need to recreate all records in a particular table, and you want it done via...

Over recent months I’ve been using Vagrant and virtualised development environments.

The ease of setup and being able to exactly mirror the final...

I share my iTunes library with a couple of friends at work, and today one of them pointed out that my Voice Memos from my iPhone were publicly available...

I came across this again the other day and this is a shameless repost, but I think they are great pointers to any programmer

1. Understand and accept...

I’ve always been intrigued with changing my keyboard layout to improve my typing speed

As a developer by profession, I spend (and have spent) the majority...

Just a short post this time. I came across this little gotcha when working on an offline iOS app using HTML5 Cache Manifest and Javascript

var date

Git commit logs need to provide information, but if they are too wordy they can hide the changes/issues covered and make a mess of reports generated...