One of the advantages of a side-project is that you can be a little extra passionate about getting things just right. If you want to increase code coverage because you think that it's good, you can - after all, it's just some time now doing things that you like. So, earlier in the year, when I saw Sebastian Bergmann's …

Having just watched Sebastian Bergmann's "The State of PHPUnit" presentation from Fosdem 2015, I was inspired to install and test a project of mine with the latest stable PHPUnit - v4.7. It was easily installed on the command line. composer global require "phpunit/phpunit" I installed it as a new, …

It's been one of those quiet spots around here for a while, so here's the catch-up on what has been happening while I was not posting. I've recently finished a short contract working with an agency, Transform (part of the Engine group) working with a couple of government departments. The Office Of The Public Guardian …

Recruiters: Here's the rules. The first recruiter to tell me the company name, and then send the job-spec gets to forward my details - if I think it's interesting. No company name, or spec, no chance If you send my details without my OK, you lose. And I tell the company you are a loser (chances are, they are too). …

If you aren't taking hiring seriously - other people can, and do hire the people you need. I've been guilty of it before - leaving it a couple of days - or even a week before getting back to someone that sent in their CV - although of course, most of the time, it didn't matter. The person wasn't going to get hired …

A quick fun post for those of you with an Amazon Kindle - some instructions on how to a) jailbreak your reader (trivially easy), and then b) put your own wallpapers on there, so you get a more interesting 'screensaver'. It's really easy, no more than 20 mins and a couple of reboots/software updates. Most of the time is …

I was out last night at the The Big Xmas [bash] #, near Silicon Roundabout. It was a fun night out meeting various people, tech, business and recruiters. Oh, the shame though - I was wearing the same T-shirt as someone else - and, yes, I have indeed replaced people with small shell scripts. Now, to the main part of …

Capistrano, makes deployment of code easy. If you need to do a number of additional steps as well, then the fact that they can be scripted and run automatically is a huge win. If you've only got a single machine (or maybe two), then you could certainly write your own quite simple, and entirely workable system - I …

I've been pretty busy in the last couple of years, first at Binweevils and in 2011, PeerIndex - hence the utter lack of posts, but as the note on my personal CV site says, I'm taking some time off between looking for my next role. This does give the opportunity to write more of PHP Scaling and the tools around …

I've previously shown you why you may want to put some tasks through a queuing system, what sort of jobs you could define, plus how to keep a worker process running for as long as you would like (but still be mindful of problems that happen). In this post, I'll show you how to put the messages into the queue, and we'll …