Development
How I Test my Firefox Theme on all Variants at Once
After a chat I had a little while back, I was asked how I am testing Modoki Firefox on all the variants at once, without installing Firefox locally.
Firefox has 4 variants - Regular, extended support (ESR), developer (used to be Aurora) and Nightly. At the core, all of these variants are still just plain ol’ Firefox. The difference being that they are different pointers in the timeline of Firefox releases - ESR representing an older, supported version, and Nightly being the bleeding-edge version.
A Year of Cloud Coding in Review
Over the past year, roughly 90% of my non-professional coding time was done using a Cloud IDE.
My work extends a crazy, disjointed range of different purposes. I maintain a WordPress plugin, run several ReactJS experiments, made my personal website 100x more confusing, and as a DevOps Engineer - lots and lots of configuring and pipelines.
All of this, I did in cloud editors. At this point, if it wasn’t for getting into Plex, my workstation laptop would have spent the whole year not getting anywhere past 50% utilisation. They have really changed my world in ways I have always been hoping for.
I Wanted a Pi to Tell me Useless Stuff About my Computer!
Yep, here we go again – another semi-useless but way over-complicated Raspberry Pi thing…
I had a fantastic idea to make an Android Auto screen for my classic tech car. Did it work? Yes. Did it obscure my windshield? Kinda. Did it over-complicate my audio setup? *sigh*… Yeah.
I’m not a fan of e-waste, so naturally instead of going into the bin, my Raspberry Pi screen got reused… As a paperweight.
Replace LAMP with Docker, the Easy way
Just about to install LAMP, XAMPP, or MAMP? Stop. Right. Now. Docker’s gotchu, fam.
LAMP stacks are great. They are an absolute fundamental to development, unless you enjoy the thrill of writing your code on your production environments.
Seriously, LAMP is the absolute fundamental in the toolbox for website development.
But do not install it.
Cancel that download, uninstall that software. Because there’s a better solution.
😭 Problems with LAMP
LAMP (XAMPP, MAMP, etc included) kits you out with all the essentials needed for running a website. Web server, language runtime and database. It can come with all the additionals you may need such as email and request logging.
The Complete Guide to Running WordPress on Windows/IIS
So you’ve discovered to your absolute horror that the WordPress site your company has inherited is running on Windows… on IIS?
Before you stand up, throw your computer chair out the Window, maliciously eat your co-workers salad and enjoy it, or drop all the production databases, relax. We’ve got you covered.
😕 What’s the problem?
Good point. IIS (Information Internet Services) is the home-grown proprietary (for now) web server provided by Microsoft for Windows customers. IIS is fantastic at what it does, and can serve as an efficient web host as well as an absolutely golden reverse proxy server.
Use Visual Studio Code in your browser, thanks to Azure
Yes, the Electron-based Visual Studio Code – an app built in HTML and JavaScript – is not usable in a web browser. What a weird world we live in.
You may sitting there in your coffee shop, staring with contempt at your weakling tablet and thinking “boy, I wish I could run Visual Studio Code on this powerful lemon”. Well Microsoft apparently listened to you and your gaping wallet. You can now use Visual Studio Code, online!
Chromeboard, an Experiment Killed by Security
You wouldn’t be wrong if you’ve come to the assumption that I’ve stopped supporting Chromeboard. You can see from the commit log that I haven’t made a significant change since March of last year. This was largely unintentional, but there was a main reason as to why I chose to unofficially abandon the extension – I call it ‘Issue 9 of Death‘.
This is the reason why a rough 5% of the internet websites actually work with this extension. I’ve stopped working on the plugin because simply, in the current approach it will soon become completely unsustainable.
Using PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.04 with Codeanywhere
I am a big fan of online IDEs. For me this enables me to do web development pretty much anywhere, on any device. My particular favourites are Codeanywhere and Codenvy. While both have their pros and cons, I pretty much use Codeanywhere free for my day-to-day development. It gives you a temporary VPS for your code, easily accessible, great no-nonsense IDE and easy to use SSH access. Perfect, I simply fire up the container and get to work.