Coding trivia 1

Random interesting stuff that I learned last week ER diagrams Entity Relationship diagrams are important concept in database design. They help to conceptualize the relationship between tables in a database. I was looking for a quick refresher on the ER diagrams. These two videos did the job: Part 1 and Part 2 Unix sockets You […]

Creating a custom keyboard layout in Linux

Sometimes you might want to modify the keyboard layout, for example to add non standard characters that you’re often using or if you’re writing in 2 different languages you might combine all their special characters in one keyboard layout. In my case I bought a keyboard that had the escape key mapped by default to […]

Setting up the fixture in PHPUnit

When running our tests we should begin with a know stage, called the fixture, and for that we might need to initialize variables etc. And after we finish the tests we might have some cleaning up to do. If you need to have custom code run before you execute them. PHPUnit allows you to configure […]

Setting up WordPress development environment with Docker

One of the biggest challenges in web development is to have a stable development environment and assuring that the website works when deploying on different servers. Docker helps us build isolated containers that give a this stable and predictable environment and saves many headaches when debugging our website. Thanks to the preconfigured images available on […]

Downloading and installing custom Linux kernels

You might want to install a different kernel to which you have supplied with your current version of Linux. This might be because another version might work better with your hardware. The Linux kernel is the core of the operating system that facilitates interaction between the hardware components and software. You can install a different […]

Setting custom PHP code sniffing rules

Code sniffing is the practice of checking the code for compliance with some pre-determined standards. It’s very important to run your code through a sniffer because it helps with maintenance and ensures better code quality. The most common standards in PHP are PSR-0, PSR-1, PSR2 and PEAR. These rules might specify details such as depth […]

What are .htaccess files?

If you were working with WordPress you probably noticed that the installation includes a .htaccess file in its main directory. Whate are these files? The .htaccess file set specific directives for the server that should be executed when an Apache server is handling requests. In the default case of WordPress it makes the server point […]

Docker volumes vs bind mounts

By default a docker container won’t store any persistent data, so anything that we write to its writable layer won’t be available once we stop it.When running Docker containers we might be interested in persisting certain data. This can be achieved by using either volumes or bind mounts. Below I’m describing main differences between the […]