CakePHP 4.4.0RC1 was released recently and I wanted to go over the new error subsystem that is being added for 4.4. I haven’t ever really loved the interface that CakePHP provided for error and exception handling.
In 2021, I designed and built a custom split keyboard . I quite enjoy that keyboard, and it has been my daily driver for the past eight months. After completing the hand wired board, I wanted to learn more about electronics, and keyboards. The natural next step to me was to learn how to take my custom layout to the next level of completion.
CakePHP 4.3 was recently released, and it contains a greatly improved way to build CASE expressions. CASE expressions are great when you want to do conditional aggregation or add computed fields to results. Lets say you wanted to create SQL that mapped integer values to string names, you could use SQL that looks like:
In part 2 I covered the electrial design, and component selections I made for my keyboard project. In this post we’ll dive into the finishing, and assembly process.
In part 1 I covered the physical/mechanical design of my keyboard project. In this post we’ll dive into the electrical design and touch on firmware development.
I’ve recently been working on overhauling the test database fixture system in CakePHP . My goals are to separate fixture schema management from fixture data management. By doing this applications will more easily be able to use their existing schema management to generate their test database. This project has entailed fixing many differences between the database servers that CakePHP supports.
Like many others, I’ve been exploring new hobbies and learning new skills as the pandemic continues to keep many of us at home. Lately, I’ve been exploring building custom mechanical keyboards.
I use task lists extensively to organize my life both work and at home. Over the years I’ve used tools like Things.app and Todoist. While I like lots about Todoist there are a few aspects I miss from Things like the ‘evening’ view and task descriptions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.