Development
How I sign my commits in Gitpod
For absolutely no good reason, I sign all my commits to GitHub. My argument to myself is to prove “it is I, who committed!”, but I don’t do meaningful enough commits to warrant that. In reality, I was curious by GitHub’s Vigilant mode, so I decided to see if I can feasibly sign all my commits for that sweet, sweet “Verified” badge alongside my commits. This is really easily done and achieved with GitHub’s commit signing guide.
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.
Bored Waiting for GitHub Codespaces? Gitpod has Your Back
I’ve been on the waiting list for GitHub Codespaces for nearly 2 years now, and I haven’t seen anything from GitHub about it. At this point, I’m even wondering if the Codespaces initiative was some kind of desert mirage, and actually doesn’t exist at all! But bored of waiting for something I’m losing the plot over, I saw what alternatives are available. In comes Gitpod to save the day. What’s the Point in (GitHub) Codespaces and Gitpod Anyway?
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.
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.
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.
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.