Writing

Blazing Fast Fuzzy Find in Vim

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.

Introducing Stickler-CI

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.

Simplifying host identification with rainbow terminals

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).

Learning Rust

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.

CakePHP 3.0 Retrospective

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.

Using CakePHP and a Horizontally Sharded Database

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.

Upgrading to CakePHP 3.0

I recently finished upgrading this site to CakePHP 3.0.0-dev from 2.5.5. I thought I’d share my experiences, as they might be helpful to other people attempting to update a CakePHP 2.x application to 3.0.

In terms of scale & size, this site is pretty small and simple. It has a mere 12 tables, and ~5000 lines of code including HTML, and uses 3 plugins.

DebugKit for CakePHP 3.0.0

A few weeks back during CakeFest 2014, I had the opportunity to hunker down and get DebugKit upgraded to CakePHP 3.0. While it was less of an upgrade and more of a re-design and re-write, I think the end results justify the drastic approach I took. First, a few of the problems I was trying to solve in the new version:

1. It is hard to make DebugKit look great as it lives on the same page as your app.

Compatibility Breaks in CakePHP 3.0

There will be a number of backwards compatibility (BC) breaks in the CakePHP 3.0.0 release. I thought it might be helpful to go over some of the reasons breaks in compatibility have been made. Each time we’ve had to break compatibility with 2.x we’ve done so because the existing behaviour fell into a few categories of problems. I’ll go over a few of the bigger categories in detail.

Camera and Audio capture in web browsers

If you’ve ever built a web application that wanted access to the visitor’s camera you know what a painful experience that can be. If used to involve flash or silverlight plugins or clunky java. Thankfully, browsers have started providing new API’s which are collectively referred to as WebRTC or Web Real Time Chat.

PHP Generators - A useful example

PHP5.5 has support for generators which are a powerful language feature available in other languages like Ruby and Python. While generators in PHP are very much like their Python counterparts, I wanted to give them a spin and try a few simple but useful examples of generators in action.

Configuration in CakePHP 3.0 redux

In a previous post, I outlined some changes that would be coming for configuration in CakePHP 3.0. I’ve recently been thinking a great deal about configuration as well as building some prototype applications. I’ve come to the conclusion that configuration needed to change. Coupling all the classes to Configure while convenient and simple, had a big drawback.