The Joy of Hex

The rabbit hole is deep when trying to switch from environment variables file to Docker secrets

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 09:47:20 +0200

We’ve been using docker for development for a while, as at this point it is easier to manage than Vagrant/Ansible even with the performance penalty on MacOSX.

Define named volume with host mount in the docker compose file

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 17:00:25 +0200

With the docker-compose version 3 and above out and about, one of the things that have been dropped is the volumes_from which was kind useful to share the volumes from one service with another. It was a nice feature for local development

Loading SQL fixtures before behat features

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 13:58:45 +0200

After figuring out the way to load the sql fixtures it was time to integrate fixtures loading in our behat suites.

Loading SQL sequentially with doctrine fixtures in Symfony project

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 09:33:19 +0200

Most of today applications store and retrieve data of some sorts, no matter if they are web, desktop or mobile (if there is a clear distinction anymore).

And it is always nice during development and testing process to have a sample data set to work with, and that can be expanded as the application evolves. It makes things simpler for onbaording new developers, because you can see how the data relates as opposed to relying on the schema and documentation (you have documentation, right?), and easier to achieve a result required for a feature when you actually have data to run queries against.

And, of course, if you have BDD/End-to-end tests, they will require test data.

Setting up alembic to detect the column length change

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 16:45:37 +0200

I love alembic, I love the way it simplifies our lives by generating bite size deltas to tables in our projects for simple and controlled migrations.

And today, I encountered an interesting problem with alembic on a project I am working on.

Using Zend Service Manager with Simplebus

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 12:58:18 +0200

We are currently working on a project that is evoliving in such a way that using a messagebus would simplify code a lot, and would help us deliver higher quality in less time. After looking around on packagist for available event/command busses, I decided to try out the SimpleBus. The docs are a bit sparse, they do give you all the necessary information, and it is a quick setup.

Running ERD in docker

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 16:25:42 +0200

Recently we started developing a new system on a project, and I needed to create the Entity Relationship Diagram. This time I wanted something simple, where I could just type it out, and the utility would spit out the file in format I need.

After some search I found this interesting tool called ERD, it was written in Haskell, and it seemed to do just what I wanted.

Deleting keys with wildcards in Redis

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:07:40 +0200

So, for you who don’t know Redis is an

open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker

Or to put it simply, it is a Key/Value Store and so much more

Adding GitHub token to Travis CI configuration

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 13:35:15 +0200

We are using Travis CI for our projects, and as we are using PHP a lot, and as great as composer is, constantly pulling in the full source for dependencies it can become tedious when you are constantly building and running tests (yes yes, I know I can limit the branches which are run). Luckily for us, composer provides a nice --prefer-dist option that will download the distribution package/zip that can save you a lot of time.

Connecting JetBrains DataGrip to Redshift

Sat, 14 May 2016 15:35:56 +0200

Last few weeks I have been working with DataGrip, a latest offering from JetBrains that is marketed as “Your Swiss Army Knife for Databases and SQL” and in my use case it most certainly turned to be true.

Introducing ERDammer

Mon, 09 May 2016 22:08:27 +0200

Lately I have been looking into tools that can help us generate Entity Relationship Diagrams from database schema of any RDBMS (provided there is a driver), and to create some kind of editable format that can be then integrated with rest of the documentation and transformed by Sphinx to html.

MySql default timezone

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 07:21:25 +0200

So lately we have been hitting some interesting egde cases (at least to us) while using the MySql on RDS and in local when using the CONVERT_TZ functions.

MySql database statistics

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 11:09:11 +0200

One of the projects we are involved with has a data store in RDS, recently I had to figure out the size of the tables and one of the databases. As RDS does not report this diectly, I had to dig through some internet to get my answers, and this post is the result, having all the queries in one place, so next time I need it, I can find it with ease.

To Hugo and Beyond

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 16:06:51 +0200

So… It has come to this… Again… I moved from Wordpress a long time ago in favor of Octopress, version 2.x at the time. It worked beautifully, for a while, and then it was time to update, and it was messy, as it did not have a separate content from theme, but I chugged along, it wasn’t like I was writing much. Then a few months ago I wanted to use Octopress 3, and it was a mess, and when I finally got it running, my alloted time was at an end.

On Speakers and Speaking

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 20:41:26 +0100

I started giving talks in various user groups and regional conferences last year, I felt I had something to say, and I got a chance do to it. <sarcasm>now that makes me an expert!!!111</sarcasm> I believe that every developer should at least once stand in front of an audience and give a talk. If you have ever considered giving a talk, you have my utmost support, I know it does not mean much to anyone, but hey… If you actually submit your talk to your UG or some conference, and get a chance to stand in front of an audience (and by audience it is any number of people larger than 1) you have my utmost respect.

Those that do not heed the star are bound to execute it repeatedly...

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 21:15:54 +0200

I guess everyone of us is dealing with Cron in some way or other, and I guess everyone has a horror story or two.

Mine is a simple tale of woe, ignorance and well, RTFM.

Sublime Text psql build system

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 18:30:00 +0000

Today I got to work with Amazon Redshift. First thing I did was go through their docs on how to connect to the server.

I tried Workbench/J and it works, it is ugly as hell, and requires Java (not a big problem, but I’d avoid it if I can). Then I went to the psql and tried it, but damn, that syntax is long before I got to the good part.

How was your weekend?

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 17:09:00 +0000

This weekend was kind of special. Both Robert Basic and myself attended the Zagreb PHP user group mini conference, and while this is not the first conference I attended, this was the first one that I did a tech talk on about Vagrant & Puppet(slides are in Serbian).

Adding Mockery to Symfony 2.3

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 09:08:00 +0000

Mockery is an essential part of my toolset. You can get more information about mockery from the repo itself, or from nettuts+. My current project in Symfony framework, 2.3 LTS, and I need to use mockery to make my life a whole lot easier. The process consists of three steps, of which step 3 is least documented. First you need to add mockery to your composer.json among other libs you will use

Building a Menu in Symfony With Events and Ordering

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:08:00 +0000

Menus are simple things, you have a root element, it has children, their children have children, and so on. All nice, clean and simple and utterly dull. Add Knp Menu and bundle to the composer file, run update, go through the docs and set it up, and be on your way. But what happens if you need to construct a menu from different bundles and you have no idea how many items there are and their order.

The curious problem of embedded document duplication

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:08:00 +0000

We upgraded the current project to Symfony 2.3.1 and sent it in production. All was working well for a few days and then interesting bug report came yesterday.

Symfony 2.3 erroring out with Xdebug

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:08:00 +0000

When working with Symfony 2.3 there is a chance that xdebug will start erroring out with “Maximum function nesting level of ‘100’ reached, aborting!” pretty quick.

Bye Wordpress and thanks for... well... um... yeah...

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 17:35:00 +0000

Well this was bound to happen sooner or later.

Targeting MongoDB driver version with Puppet

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:32:08 +0000

As mentioned here for our current project we are using Vagrant and Puppet. In the link above I described how I solved the pear packages installation under Puppet.

We are using Symfony 2.0.15 with MongoDB, I need to use version 1.2.9 to avoid the whole setSlaveOK hubbub as described here.

Pear Packages installation under Vagrant with Puppet

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:33:23 +0000

I have been running Vagrant vm with Puppet for the last 4 months for my development work. Most of the vagrant stuff is pretty straight forward, once you grasp the concepts. This post will assume that you are familiar with Vagrant and Puppet, if you are not this is a great place to start.

Automated database changes management with Ant and dbdeploy

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:20:30 +0000

In the last couple of months we started using Ant tool heavily to do server deployments, along with Jenkins server (although not in the role it was intended, but hey, it serves the purpose).

Getting MAMP to play nice with vhosts

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:04:56 +0000

Front end developers in the team we are a part of are using MAMP to serve their websites localy. Aside from that they had virtually no experience setting up vhosts on it. So I thought I should put this little tutorial to help them out a bit.

Batch file rename from shell

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:13:19 +0000

Recently I needed to reuse some files by renaming them or just parts of the name that have a certain word in it. I started doing it manually, but as you can imagine it is a tedious, lengthy and error prone process. There had to be a better way to do it.

As I have learned in recent months, there usually is and is usually connected with shell/terminal :)

Search and replace text in files from shell

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:47:39 +0000

Recently I needed to reuse some files by replacing certain words in them. I started doing it manually, but as you can imagine it is a tedious, lengthy and error prone process. There had to be a better way to do it.

As I have learned in recent months, there usually is and is usually connected with shell/terminal :)

Changing the Jenkins home directory on Ubuntu - take 2

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:53:20 +0000

A month ago, Robert blogged about changing the Jenkins CI home directory on Ubuntu.

Symfony2, Sonata Admin Bundle and file uploads

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:03:58 +0000

I am writing a bundle that needs to have a file uploaded to server and later served, I am also using Sonata Admin bundle.

Custom Repository with DIC in Symfony2

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:50:40 +0000

I am currently working on some Symfony2 bundles, I needed a custom repository to house hold my custom queries, that part is easy with sf2, and quite nicely explained in the Manual.

Getting Flash to work in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:31:25 +0000

This is a digest from a bunch of information from the web. If Flash is not working in your Chrome browser you may need to create the following symlink to get it working 1 2 sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so \ /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ As usual YMMV, have fun.

Setting up virtual hosts for Apache on Ubuntu for local development

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:38:00 +0000

Lately I have been doing a lot of php development, and I am using Ubuntu Linux for it.

One of my biggest pains was/is setting up an alias or virtual host for the new project (yes, I am coming from the lazy windows world).

After a few tries and a lot of help from Robert Basic I put together this post to remind me next time I get a bad case of stupid.

Seesmic Desktop 2 Filter Plugin

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:46:58 +0000

If you are like me, you use twitter a lot, and one of the most annoying things about most of the desktop clients is the lack of filtering out the noise from useful tweets.

AS3 Array filter function with multiple parameters

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:34:11 +0000

Recently I have been working on a pure AS3 project that at one point required me to do quite a lot of filtering on a few arrays. While AS3 provides a nice new set of functions for filtering, they all had a common shortcoming for my usage scenario, they can not accept parameters directly.

IntelliJ Idea templates for AS3 project with preloader

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:15:34 +0000

I’ve been playing with IntelliJ Idea Ultimate edition for the last couple of days to do as3 development in it. I really like what I see so far, but to make my life easier, I created two template files, that should give me setup similar to Flash Develop AS3 project with preloader.

Ruby Gem tool and Windows 7

Sun, 30 May 2010 18:30:26 +0000

While trying to setup the RoR with XAMPP on my windows 7 machine I encoundered an error 1 ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EEXIST) while trying to run 1 gem install rails --include-dependencies Turns out none of the other gem commands worked. The solution is simple, you need to run the command prompt with elevated privileges (run as admin) to get it to work.

Setting up Gitosis on Windows 7

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:33:22 +0000

For a long time I have been a Subversion(SVN) user, but a few months back (or is it a year) I heard about this new fangled VCS with a D in front, called Git. After a few chuckles about the name, I was curious to see how, and why it is supposedly better than SVN.

Camp and some Code

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:30:56 +0000

On Saturday the 27th of April I attended my first MS CodeCamp in Belgrade. Up to now I tried to keep up either by livecasts, or by later watching the recordings (if available).

Archive page

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000