I had a VPS on a popular developer-centric cloud platform. It started out life as Ubuntu 14, several years ago, and predates my learning about IaC, Terraform and Ansible. After starting work at a hosting company, I thought I may as well migrate my stuff over. And so, the headache

It wasn't waterfall. It wasn't scrum. It was both and it was neither and it was doomed to fail from the get-go. Once you've been doing this for a while, you'll understand that pretty much every aspect of the discipline, at least in a professional setting, has a trade-off. To

I was getting errors from Certbot invalid response from .well-known/acme-challenge It took a lot of messing around but the problem lay with a Cloudflare setting. > SSL/TLS -> Edge Certificates -> Always Use HTTPS > Redirect all requests with scheme “http” to “https”. This applies to all http requests to

Businesses are usually around for longer than individual employees' tenures. At some point, someone else has to take over your workload. If you have an owner mindset rather than a custodian mindset this is difficult. Handovers are not easy. Trying to cover all bases and think of everything you might

Framework choices can be critical. The wrong choice is going to cause a big increase in the amount of technical debt a project has and can harm the onboarding process for new employees, which already carries a high opportunity cost [https://bencromwell.com/2017/10/22/opportunity-costs/]. Problematic choices: * Flavour

Opportunity costs are so often missed in a myriad of different areas. For software engineering we of course have them too. If you've not read The Mythical Man Month, you may have at least heard its central premise: > Adding resources to a late software project makes it later Or perhaps

I've seen some criticism of Git recently, on Twitter, with a ton of likes, suggesting a large amount of people have a difficult time using Git. Git is not that hard. It really isn't. I think the problem stems from two main approaches. Problem the first: Shying away from the

I read the advice here [https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/] some time ago, and I've been following it by and large. However, only recently I discovered how to enforce a line limit when git-commit starts up nano: ~/.gitconifg: [core] editor = nano -r 72 The problem is that doesn't help

Logging is an important thing to get right. It is a window into what's happening in your application, right now and [x] days ago. Keeping a close eye on the error logs allows you to find bugs that users haven't reported, or haven't noticed. Doing logging right involves a few

Laravel Facades came in for some criticism a couple of years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1zpm0y/laravel_lets_talk_about_facades/ http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/5952 https://www.brandonsavage.net/lets-talk-about-facades/ I've got a greenfield project at work using Lumen (Laravel Lite), which is what's brought

In this day and age of frequent large scale data breaches and compromising of passwords, security is rightly being talked about more. Unfortunately, this is often at the expense of user experience. Can't we have both? The simple answer is no, but the longer answer is a more complicated yes

If the LinkedIn hack has told us anything, it's some stuff that we already knew. You can't really on even massive, well known sites to store passwords correctly, or to have been doing so since they started out. Get your family and friends setup We as techies have a responsibility

There's a lot of stuff I think everyone should know about how credit files work but not enough people do know. N.B. I'm from the UK, I only know about the UK. This post deals only with how it works in the UK. Credit Scores Your credit score is

Scenario: you're stuck with Zend 1 (which will support PHP7 - great news for those of us with legacy apps!) and you're building an API. You've got routes like /api/categories, and /api/products but you want to provide some nice, nested resource routes, such as /api/categories/42/products

I can't believe I've only recently discovered the benefits of having a config file sitting in ~/.ssh A couple of my Digital Ocean [https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=30ce714dfaf8] boxes have non-standard SSH ports and it's a bit of an arse to type it out every time. Example ~/.ssh/config:

Ember 1.9 [http://emberjs.com/blog/2014/12/08/ember-1-9-0-released.html] came out a few days ago, continuing along the path towards HTMLBars. It took me longer than the expected 5 minutes to upgrade HungryBun [https://hungrybun.com] due to a couple of small issues regarding support for Handlebars

You may have heard of Ello. It's a new social network with no users and no revenue model. OK, so it does have a fair amount of users and it continues to grow rapidly by invite. The curious thing about it, though, is their claims that: * they'll never have adverts