PHPNW12: Effective code reviews

A really entertaining talk, with great slides, by Sebastian Marek at PHPNW12 on Code Reviews. As usual, the notes below are a mix my understanding of what Sebastian said and what I was thinking as he said it. If I’ve misunderstood or misheard, just let me know in the comments. Introducing the characters (cute little …

PHPNW12: Catching opportunities in Open Source

Christian Schaefer and Stefan Koopmanschap talking about Open Source and community. It’s nice every so often to sit in a talk which you’re in broad agreement with, and obviously as a keen proponent of a Open Source this talk was right slap bang in the middle of my interests. The notes below are a combination …

PHPNW12: Don’t reboot, debug!

Some notes from Joshua Thijssen’s talk, which focussed on the knowledge and methods needed to deal with problems in production in a measured way. I was at the back of the room, and some of this is outside my wheelhouse, but here’s the notes; just bear in mind I might have either misheard or misunderstood …

PHPNW12: Ade Oshineye on Dev Experience, API Design and Craft Skills

These are the notes I made not so much of what Ade was saying, although some of the following was said by Ade, but also of my thoughts as he spoke. Really great talk, thank you Ade. Apprenticeship patterns: acquisition, transmission, growth. We are all API designers, we all write functions we ourselves use later …

Issues with embedding Vimeo videos with HTTPS URLs

As documented in WordPress trac ticket #20102, there is an issue with oEmbeds from some services which have started allowing/using https URLs rather than http URLs. The ticket documents an issue with the oEmbed functionality, oEmbed is the technology which allows you to paste a YouTube URL into your blog and have that converted to …

Speeding myself up on the commandline

I tend to find myself in the terminal.app on my Mac more often than not, SSHing into servers, checking whois, host, and any number of other things. My most frequent incantation is searching the command history so I don’t have to re-type a previous command, something like this: I’ll then copy and paste the command …

Economies of abundance

This really struck a chord with me: “Making money from open source is a hack though, as our currencies are based in scarcity and our peer economies are based in abundance. In the latter, the more people participating means the more everyone benefits.” Daniel Bachhuber – an economy of abundance

A quick custom plugin to import redirections into Safe Redirect Manager

At Code for the People we’ve just imported a load of blogposts from Drupal into WordPress. One of the differences is that Drupal encodes fancy characters, like typographically nice “quote marks”, into the URL whereas WordPress mostly drops them. We ended up with about 80 URLs which had changed and the need for a redirections …

Alfred extension: Convert clipboard to plain text

Update: Well, what do you I know? It turns out that Andrew, developer of Alfred, has already got this covered and my weak Google-Fu didn’t turn it up: plain text paste in Alfred. So don’t use my version, use his. I got tired of copying formatted text from a web page, pasting into a text …