Writing

Improved Application Switcher for Elementary OS

I’ve recently switched to Elementary OS after many years of MacOS. Elementary by and large has been fantastic, and I like the low-configuration approach to OS design. The default alt-tab handler is my biggest gripe. It uses a combination of animated zoom, and brightness changes that I find visually tiring. I hoped that others had shared my pain and built an alternate solution.

Build logs available in Stickler-ci

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.

Moving to Linux

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.

New TwigView Plugin

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.

Keeping notes with vimwiki

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.

Building Custom Builds for Stickler CI

Recently I shipped a new feature to Stickler CI that enables users to extend Javascript and Python builds with additional packages. Maintaining review tool dependencies can be a drain on your team’s time. Stickler CI helps solve this problem, but used to come with a tradeoff of not being able to fully customize your style rules.

Using Rector to Ease Upgrades

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.

Building an iterator that can grow

A few weeks ago I ran into a tricky to solve issue in CakePHP. It involved an iterator that needs be grown during iteration, and nested loops over that same iterator. While infrequent, there are scenarios where you would want to grow an iterator as it is being iterated. My situation is the plugin registry for CakePHP. Plugins support a bootstrap hook method that is used to initialize a plugin.

Evolution of Container Usage in Stickler CI

Stickler CI is a software as a service application that automates a tedious part of code review; enforcing consistent style and preventing lint errors. By integrating with GitHub, Stickler checks each pull request for style errors and post review comments when an error is found. This helps your team align on coding standards and provide more valuable feedback. Stickler is free for public repositories; private repositories require a paid plan.