While looking at performance data for Stickler CI, I noticed that some reviews spent a surprising amount of time talking to the GitHub API. While Stickler CI spending a large amount of time talking to GitHub isn’t that shocking, what caught my interest was the amount of time spent fetching modified files.

Up until now if a build failed, or didn’t run correctly on stickler-ci you had to rely on the build status to figure out what to try. While this mostly works when jobs outright fail, it isn’t great for jobs that succeed with the wrong or unexpected results. If you got incorrect or unexpected results, debugging what was going on was a tedious and time consuming process. Thankfully, those days are behind us now.

For the past 15 years I’ve been a Mac user. Like many, I loved the best in class hardware, great desktop shell, and the ability to use BSD/*nix tools without having to run virtual machines. When my 2012 Macbook pro was no longer aging gracefully, I started evaluating my options for a new machine. MacOS was no longer as appealing as it once was.

CakePHP 4.1.0 is going to be released soon. Thanks to othercorey and ndm2 4.1.0 adds powerful new features to the ORM – Window functions and Common Table Expressions.

Window functions

Window functions enable you to generate aggregations for ‘windows’ of your data.

CakePHP ships with PHP based templates, and while this works for many people we’ve also recently re-launched the Twig plugin. For that past several years Wyrihaximus has maintained the excellent TwigView plugin. The CakePHP core team has joined forces with Wyrihaximus and taken over completing the 4.

I’ve long kept notes and ideas written down in a variety of text files across my computer. While this ‘worked’ I always found it a bit lacking, but was not willing to commit to a cloud based notes application as I prefer the simplicity and portability of plain text files. I recently read an article on

Upgrading major libraries that your application depends on can be a tedious and time consuming process. Dealing with deprecations and backwards incompatible changes can consume a significant amount of time and energy. In the past we’ve relied on manually updating code or using find and replace. But in last few years new techniques have emerged that make routine upgrades easier to do.