As a long time open source maintainer, I occasionally have to modify pull requests made by contributors via forks. If a contributor needs help adding/fixing tests, or addressing linter errors, it is often simpler for me to modify a pull request by adding a commit to their branch. I like this workflow as I can help the contributor out, and give them the option to revise my changes as well.

I recently built a GitHub Application for Stickler CI and wanted to share what I learned along the way. While the documentation for GitHub Applications is pretty good there were a few things I struggled with.

With the recent release of PHP 5.4-RC1, I wanted to give it a spin and make sure there weren’t any upcoming issues for CakePHP. I recently saw a great article from Derick Rethans on getting PHP setup from an SVN checkout.

In a previous post I talked about switching to Vim and how I was using Janus to get a good foundational set of plugins to work with, and make starting with vim less daunting. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with vim, I wanted a simpler way to manage my vim config.

I’m pretty prone to making stupid mistakes all the time. I think its a mixture of being busy, and being a natural scatter brain. In any case, mistakes happen, and thankfully over time developers have come up with a number of ways to combat mistakes. These usually take the shape in automated toolds. Unit tests are a great way to automated tool to help prevent stupid mistakes from happening, Git commit hooks are another.