Over the last month, I’ve been building a ‘fun’ project that uses CakePHP, TypeScript and React. While I maintain AssetCompress it is poorly suited for react or vue applications.

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.

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.

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.

With the release of CakePHP 3.7.0 quickly approaching, I wanted to help validate the release candidates by upgrading a few of my sites and seeing how much work it was. I’d like to share the process I followed for my upgrades on Stickler CI, this site and a few others I maintain.

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.

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.

In the next major release of CakePHP we’re going to be removing the AuthComponent. This component and its helpers have been part of CakePHP since the 1.2 days, but their time has come to an end. Over the years, AuthComponent has become a complex and difficult to extend piece of CakePHP. In its wake, we’re promoting two new plugins.

In this three part series, I’m going to cover the evolution of Stickler CI in the past 2 years from the initial prototype to the present day. This specific article will cover how I brought Stickler CI from an unprofitable project to a revenue generating product and the growing pains surrounding that journey.

In this three part series, I’m going to cover the evolution of Stickler CI in the past 2 years from the initial prototype to the present day. This specific article will cover how I built the initial prototype and then added paid plans.

Stickler CI users have expressed that automatically enabling default linters can create a flood unwanted comments in pull requests, which is overwhelming and noisy. In response to these issues, we have changed the process of connecting a repository to Stickler CI.

Integration testing with external webservices, has historically been an uncomforable process in PHP for me. It frequently involves complicated mocking that was fragile and hard to maintain. I’ve long wished for a PHP library that was as simple to use as HTTPretty is in Python.

Many people are surprised when they find out I use VIM as my primary editor. While vim seems like a ‘basic’ editor, it can have IDE like features added through its massive plugin community. I recently upgraded how I do fuzzy file navigation and find in project, and wanted to share how you can get blazing fast search in vim.

I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on over the past few months. Stickler-CI helps automate the tedious process of ensuring coding standards are followed during pull requests. Like many teams, FreshBooks uses pull requests as a way to solicit feedback from other developers, ensure consistent coding practices and catch bugs before they can cause real problems.

In my daily work, I end up having to ssh into a variety of hosts. Keeping track of which terminal is on which host can become challenging when I have 3 or 4 terminals all at a mysql prompt, or tailing log files. A co-worker of mine came up with a pretty clever solution that I wanted to share. The clever solution involves some bash, and Applescript (as we’re working off of OSX).

I’m excited to announce the availability of a PSR7 Bridge plugin for CakePHP. This plugin lets you bridge PSR7 Middleware with CakePHP 3.3+ applications.

While I’m a big fan of dependency injection, I find dependency injection containers less alluring. I’ve found that liberal usage of containers can make application code harder to follow, and often the container definitions go untested, creating a spawning pool for bugs.

I’m always looking for new challenges. With my background mostly being in web development, I have little to no experience in low-level languages. In the past I’ve tinkered with C, and go-lang. This summer, I decided to try and learn Rust. Rust aims to be a very safe and performant systems-level language.

With CakePHP 3.0 out the door, I thought it would be good to reflect on the project. CakePHP 3.0 is the longest and largest open source project milestone I’ve ever participated in. At FreshBooks we do retrospectives on large projects as a way to see what went well, and what could have gone better. The goal is to discover things we should keep doing, and what to improve the next time around.

One approach to scaling out a database for a multi-tenant application is to horizontally shard or partition the data by customer. This often takes the form of having multiple identical copies of an application’s schema in each shard. For example customer A’s data would be in shard 1, while customer C’s data would be in shard 2.