Jan 8, 2017
I primarily focus on code as a communication tool between programmers, even when I’m just writing code that will only be read by my future self. It’s a set of machine instructions secondary to that.
Oct 24, 2016
Recently, I spoke at the University of Arizona’s IT Summit about Elixir and Phoenix and what makes them special.
Jul 22, 2016
It’s a fairly common pattern, in my experience, to prepare some routes for your express application in a separate file (module) and export them. Then they can be imported in a file that’s only responsible for putting your server together, with routes and middleware. It’s only one step removed from a solution I’m using in a current project in which I export a function that configures and returns a middleware. Something like this:
Aug 5, 2015
So I like building my custom modules in the test first fashion. In Drupal, to test de-coupled site functionality from custom modules, it’s conventional (and pretty easy) to use the built-in Simpletest. It provides some pretty neat Drupal-specific functions to help with creating and logging in users, creating nodes, etc. However, some of these functions are a little less than well-documented, but hey, it’s PHP. TDD is a product of my Ruby background because automatic test are valued in that community of developers, as evidenced by the many libraries and some of the test styles even creeping into other language communities, like Cucumber. In PHP, TDD is treated differently and isn’t as important, at least historically. So it only makes sense that the documentation would be a little weak, but anyway.
Aug 3, 2015
Just a quick heads up for those of you managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers out there that might run into the following error: