Often I see some image like this designed to spark up public arguments on facebook.

There is no bad answer for this math problem. Everyone is a winner. Allow me to explain.

There is an inherient pitfall lurking in each hasMany/belongsToMany relationship. This goes beyond the famous n+1 problem. Allow me to elaborate.

Sometimes we just need to read in a csv file in php. I’ve tried using thephpleague’s csv package but it is over engineered in my opinion to do something so basic. Really, I want something similar to how file_get_contents gives me the entire content of the file but for the csv (in array format).

Here is a snippet I made that reads in a csv and returns an array of results.

I started playing around with a variety of databases lately (future posts to come) because I wanted to scrape a bunch of json data, dump those into a database and start sorting and filtering results. The json data is finanical information and has hundreds of data points (some in nested layers) and I wasn’t quite sure what information I even want to search for. There are gigabytes of raw json text being shoved into this database, and as I do exploratory data anaylsis, I wanted a nice place to store and query/filter/order/map the data without the overhead of creating lots of schemas. So some of you might ask. Why not use the json data type on Mysql/PGSQL? Sure. Sure, that works. It’s gets tedious to query those things nested in a json column. Not to mention I want to do indexing to speed up my query searches. I’m scraping this data from varying sources, and I’m not even certain which data is relevant or useful yet. So nosql seemed like a good fit here. I think from a performance standpoint, I’d probably be fine with SQL tables as I’m dealing with 100’s of GB of data. But that isn’t the point. I’m trying to quickly get data imported and start exploring it without any overhead of defining schemas where I’m unsure of data layout. In this project, I’m keeping track of changes over time. So, a time serious database design is useful. I checked out Influx, but decided against it. Currently, I’m adding a column for the snapshot time. Every story has an ending, and RethinkDB’s tale ends sadly. RethinkDB has ceased development. The simplicity of this tool is what drew me to it. As previously dicussed, horizontal scaling and sharding is a breeze. The admin panel is really slick. You can run commands straight from the admin website. This would be a really nice tool, a middleground between SQL and no-SQL. Something I could add to the Batman utility belt. Alas, without future development, the project is likely to burn out like a red-dwarf, surely but slowly. Here are my ratings for RethinkDB. These are just arbitrary, not based on any sort of benchmarks or anything, so don’t take them too seriously. - Getting Started: 9/10 - Adoption: 3/10 - Documentation: 7/10 - Scaling: 9/10 - Security: 6/10 - Similarity to SQL: 7/10 - Production Ready: Probably not due to development shutdown In the future I’m going to review some of the following tools. Python for big data - h5py - mpi4py - dask - https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-handle-large-datasets-in-python-with-pandas-and-dask-34f43a897d55 - blaze - PyStore https://medium.com/@aroussi/fast-data-store-for-pandas-time-series-data-using-pystore-89d9caeef4e2 - Pandas as big data https://www.dataquest.io/blog/pandas-big-data/ https://github.com/wiktorski/opentsdb_pandas https://towardsdatascience.com/the-best-format-to-save-pandas-data-414dca023e0d Plain-text CSV — a good old friend of a data scientist Pickle — a Python’s way to serialize things MessagePack — it’s like JSON but fast and small HDF5 —a file format designed to store and organize large amounts of data Feather — a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use binary file format for storing data frames Parquet — an Apache Hadoop’s columnar storage format Timescale Looks interesting https://docs.timescale.com/latest/tutorials/tutorial-hello-timescale Other sqlless databases - Couchbase - ElasticSearch - HBase - Cassandra - MongoDB - DynamoDB - neo4j - Google Cloud Datastore - Aerospike

Laravel allows us to validate requests before they even make it to our controllers. It does this using named form requests

Thus you might write a controller action like so:

public function storeBlog(BlogRequest $request)
{
    // request has already been validated
}

My work buddy and I were talking about tests. We wanted something to go through every route in our system and check for any obvious errors. That seemed like a pretty simple way to test an application.

So I wrote a generator to create tests for me automatically at work. I wanted to test every route we have in the system. We have hundreds of routes on this particular project I’m working on today. On our last large project we had over a thousand routes. What can I say? We like our routes.

A while back I wrote about downloading a file in Laravel and then removing the file. This prevents us from having to clean up the storage directory full of files with a cronjob. I recently had this issue come back up at work and now we are on Laravel 5. Let’s revisit this issue.

Laravel 5 gives us a nifty little command to change our application’s namespace. Out of the box the default namespace is App. To change it, we simply run:

php artisan app:name Horsefly

However, once you register your app namespace, how do you get it later? Laravel doesn’t save it in config(‘app.name’) or anything like that.

When you want to monitor a github repo, you can setup travis-ci, hudson or bamboo continous integration (CI) server. A problem arrises though. What if you want to run scripts on a server that is behind a firewall? The CI server may not be able to access this private server behind your protected network.

This is where gitmon is used. We can monitor the git repository for changes and then when things do change we can run a changed script. The changed script is placed within the repository itself so developers can work with it. This changed script can email people, run bash commands, whatever you want it to do.

Today I fiddled around generating docs for a company package. There are a lot of doc generators out there, here are a few and their examples:

• Sami [example]
• Apigen [example]
• PHP Documentor [example]
• PHP DOX [example]
• PHP Rocco [example]
• Pinocchio [example]
• Doxygen [example]
• and a few others

I played around with some of these. I like the approach of annotated source code but sometimes it is more useful to have api documentation. Annotated source code is cool because you can follow along line by line and really uncover the guts of a library. When I’m looking for public methods I don’t want to have to sift through annotated source code.

How easy is it to search for files with laravel? Using Symfony’s Finder class it is really, really easy!

Say I wanted to recursively search a directory for all the files with fish in the name, over 100KB in size and had some text: ‘awesome’ inside of the file. That would be a tough one with just native php but never to fear, Fabien Potencier is here. Oh and I forgot to mention, I only want files that have been modified since yesterday. Oh and can you sort those by name for me? Thanks.

Lately, I was given the task to write some php classes with Laravel that make use of Zencoder api. The way Zencoder works is I create a new encoding job and during that request I tell Zencoder emails and url locations to send notifications when that job is finished.

After 2 years of using Laravel, I’d never been a huge fan of blade. When I first met Taylor Otwell at Genghis grill, I probably insulted him by saying:

“I hate blade” - me to Taylor Otwell

You ever apply for a job and they make you do a little programming question? These are fun sarcasm because they usually have some math involved and it provides me a small and unimportant challenge - similar to a video game.

I’ve made the switch over to hexo for my page. I’ve used weebly for years now and I loved it for it’s ability to quickly crank out awesome content using a drag and drop builder. However, I’m a web developer and I find myself often fighting weebly.

For example, on weebly I had my portfolio website written with Ember js but one day it stopped working when weebly changed how it includes javascripts (like jquery) into the source - this ended up breaking the site. I decided then that enough is enough. Time to make the switch. For a while now, I’ve been interested in front-matter Markdown-based blog systems like [Jekyll](http://jekyllrbb.com], Hexo, Sculpin, Ghost and a few others.

There are some things I do daily and being a human I often forget them. I could just set up reminders on my phone but I wanted to do it on my computer. After some research I found a few articles that really helped me out. Here is my setup on Ubuntu.

ETags PHONE HOME?! No. So what are ETags? Wikipedia has this to say:

{% blockquote %} The ETag or entity tag is part of HTTP, the protocol for the World Wide Web. It is one of several mechanisms that HTTP provides for web cache validation, and which allows a client to make conditional requests. This allows caches to be more efficient, and saves bandwidth, as a web server does not need to send a full response if the content has not changed. ETags can also be used for optimistic concurrency control as a way to help prevent simultaneous updates of a resource from overwriting each other. {% endblockquote %}

I’ve been watching the TDD debates with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and David Hansson. There is some good material in there. It’s pretty cool watching these three. All three are developer heroes of mine. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a debate.

Martin Fowler plays time cop and mediator but doesn’t speak that much which is a shame because I know he is a bad ass - and he’s got that cool accent. Kent seems to go with David’s flow. Kent even has an article on Facebook called Rest In Peace TDD.

I began writing this article months ago when I started researching standing desks. I started writing an article and realized, I should probably buy a desk first before I write this blog post. Thus, all that was saved in my draft was this line:

{% blockquote %} I sit. A lot. So much in fact that it is killing me. I want to stand more. I want to move more. {% endblockquote %}

From the desperation found in the quote above, one thing was clear - I desired change. I won’t go into details but my health was the primary reason I was seeking out standing desks.

So you’ve got a new project you want to build and you’re going to pick a front-end javascript framework. First make sure you absolutely need the single page application. Chances are you can do without it. However, let’s say you want to do a lot of javascript client-side intensive stuff, then how should you decide what framework to use? I’ve been in this same scenario myself multiple times, so I decided to blog about it. I have a love-hate relationship with all 3 of these frameworks because I have used all of them on work and personal projects. I only focus on client side frameworks here, not server side, e.g. meteor, sailsjs, express. I only included the frameworks I have the most experience with.

Let’s say you are running a report for the user. You generate some temporary file to give to the user and now you have this zombie pdf file sitting out there in your /tmp directory. How do you clean it up? Why not do it directly after you serve to the user? Here are a couple of options. The first option just cleans up the file after the application has served the response.

Route::get('get-file', function()
{
    $filename = storage_path() . '/testing.txt';
 
    App::finish(function($request, $response) use ($filename)
    {
        unlink($filename);
    });
 
    return Response::download($filename);
});

After kicking the boot around for a while I finally decided to re-factor the asset pipeline. The functionality is all in all the same but the code is easier on the eyes. However, I did bring in a lot of new features.

• Config allows you to control caching interface
• Config allows you to control directives
• Config allows you to control which environments are concatenated
• Config allows you to control mime types so you can combine javascripts and stylesheets in a single folder
• Use a sprockets parser and generator to create the Rails-style asset pipeline functionality
• Use relative paths in the manifest files
• Use Laravel event listener to alter the configuration of the pipeline after package boot/start up
• Use caching to speed up local development when using a lot of pre-processors (i.e. coffee, less, sass)
• Use assets:generate to create static files in public/assets directory.
• Completely customize the javascript_include_tag, stylesheet_link_tag composers
• Completely customize the AssetController class

This is the last part in three of the hexagonal pattern series. You can download a simple example [here](https://github.com/kdocki/laravel-presenter-example].

Presenters allow you to tack on additional fields and logic to an existing Laravel model. There are several libraries out there that assist in creating presenters, namely,

• ShawnMcCool/laravel-auto-presenter
• robclancy/presenter

I am going to use robclancy presenter just because I have more experience with it. After we include it in our composer.json and include the two ServiceProviders and we are set to use it.

Here I am going to walk through an example of how to use macros and additional views to get rid of logic in our Laravel views.

Laravel is traditionally an MVC framework but MVC just doesn’t seem to scale for larger projects. Typically what ends up happening is logic is crammed into each section: models, views and controllers as the application grows which becomes next to impossible to test. Taylor Otwell’s book mentions the repository pattern but even that doesn’t really solve this scalability problem. After a colleague showed me a blog post about the Hexagonal Pattern in rails, I decided to try the design in Laravel - the results were nice.

Well, I attempted to create a guard/grunt prototype for php. I attempted and failed. Why did I fail? The technology just isn’t there yet. I am going to have to re-think the architecture if I go any further.

I was using pcntl_signal to determine when an application shuts down, so that I could terminate any external processes that had been spawned by guard. One such process event handler was the livereload-protocol I implemented in php which via web sockets notifies any connected clients when files were changed on the server. Similar to how grunt watch works with livereload.

The problem is that pcntl_signal doesn’t work in Windows. Thus, I stopped working on this.

A while back I wrote about handling CSRF tokens with ajax calls to Laravel. I have re-vamped my philosophy since then. All routes should have protection, not just a few. This ensures that I

1. Never accidentally leave a route unprotected
2. Reduce complexity in my routes. Don’t worry about which routes are protected or unprotected.

There is a new programming language in town. I expect great things from https://github.com/lhartikk/ArnoldC

What does this program do? I have no idea and I wrote it.

Let me first say, I don’t think password confirmations are bad UX design. But I ask you, are they really necessary? I don’t think so.

Let’s take a look at some popular sites which have millions of users. These are industry leaders.

Let me first say, I don’t think password confirmations are bad UX design. But I ask you, are they really necessary? I don’t think so. Let’s take a look at some popular sites which have millions of users. These are industry leaders.

Laravel 4 is certainly out of beta now and still continues to be one of the best php frameworks. One thing sorely missing is an asset pipeline. A few attempts have been made to remedy this but none have fit the bill. Here were a few should be’s on my mind when developing this…

If you’ve ever ventured into javascript land with your Laravel application and suddenly you don’t have a nice <form> to work with but instead are making ajax calls then you might have wondered how to do CSRF protection. Here’s how easy it is to do ajax csrf protection.

$.ajaxSetup({
    headers: {
        'X-CSRF-Token': $('meta[name="csrf-token"]').attr('content')
    }
});

I recently came about this nifty little command I can use to start a laravel application.

php artisan serve

So a few months ago, I remember having lunch with Taylor at Genghis Grill and he was talking about maybe doing a video series to make money. Travis and I both suggested he write a book on Laravel. Heck, I even promised that I’d buy, so here we are a few months later and he has his book out. I’ve purchased the book, but haven’t gotten to read it yet.

I was reading a blog post by Derek Bailey where he talks about managing twitter bootstrap modals in Marionette. That gave me an idea to write a javascript mixin that I could reuse for my twitter bootstrap modals that just simply lets me open and close modals properly. It helps eliminate a little bit of boiler plate code to handle modals.

So I created a simplistic asset pipeline (sprockets style) interface for Deployd framework. The node package basically piggy backs off of the awesome mincer.js nodejs package. I was investigating Deployd as a way to do quick to life prototypes in nodejs. Unfortunately, it looks like Deployd might be dead or no longer maintained - so it is very unlikely that I will be doing any more with dpd-mincer. However, it was fun to see how difficult it is to work with deployd, and it actually was simple enough after a few console.log() to figure out what was inside some dpd objects.

I wanted something to do tags for a project I’m working on, so I put together something quick with Select2 which (imo) is much more feature-rich than it’s sister plugin Chosen. I’ve not tried out tag-it so I can’t really comment on how well it works.

I’ve been busy web programming and changing diapers. But I figured I should write about something just so weebly doesn’t think my website died. So I decided to take 5 minutes to write.

** Nerd alert - below statement contains nerdenium known to cause severe headaches**

I recently stumbled upon a bug in angular. https://github.com/angular/angular.js/pull/1661

At the time of this writing the bug is still present in version 1.0.5 (stable) and 1.1.13 (unstable). Maybe it’s not a good idea to bind to a primitive type in an array but let’s say you had just a simple javascript array of strings and you want to repeat those in unordered list. Seems simple right? Now say you want to update the array model - let’s call it list.

Not had a lot of time to write lately with my 11 week old daughter, wife and work keeping me more than busy. But while I was working I was looking up RFC 2324 (http protocol) status codes and ran across this 418 I’m a teapot code.

Feel free to print this off.

How does one access the parent of the $scope in a controller? Easy… use $scope.$parent. You can even get parents of parents. Neat, right?

I really enjoy working with Sublime Text 2. I encourage you to try it out! Watch the video to see a demonstration of some functionality Sublime gives you.

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now to do some php programming and I still love it. I feel like an ultimate bad-ass every time I do multi-line edits.

Csv files are very underrated. Below is a pretty straightforward way to read in a csv file in bash. Regardless of it’s simplicity, I thought I’d share it. I may need to remind myself later how to do this.

I happened to stumble upon this 45 minute video lecture given by Henry Markham (in 3 parts). In this lecture, he talks about creating virtual biological models of the brain - project Blue Brain.

So you hear your boss or client say, I want my reports in “Excel and/or PDF,” and you think, “crap, now I gotta go find a library for my language.” And the requester isn’t often thinking about how much $$$ when they mention they want pdfs. So I had this same experience at UALR and I didn’t know the first thing about constructing pdf files. Thankfully, I found a free (with open source projects) Pdf library for Java called iText and within a day was able to construct a decent looking pdf file.

In this ten minute cut video, I unwrap a new toy. The Boxee set me back about $200, not to mention Best Buy had a $99 sale only a week later (that’s life). At first $200 may seem expensive but hear me out.

ActiveRecord is to Ruby on Rails as Active Objects is to Java. Ideally it would be called AwesomeObjects. At last, persisting data for your Java web application is not all xml, POJOS, EJBs and did I mention xml? I don’t hate xml but I find configuring your application extremely inefficient after working with other frameworks that utilize convention over configuration.

Why do I have to specifiy a log4j properties file, hibernate persistance.xml configuration. And there’s soooo many options of how to develop: JPA, Wicket, OJB, Spring, Struts, Torque, Cayenne, Jaxor, TJDO, JDBM, pBeans, JPOX, Simple ORM, Ibatis, XORM, Speedo, Smyle, PAT, LiDO, JDO, IntelliBO, KodoJDO, Hamlets, Faces, RIFE, Shale, Sling, Stripes, Vaadin, Poopdeck (okay, I just made that one up). Point is that It can be a real headache to develop a Java web app.

Furthermore, why do I have to create my POJOs and SQL for my database? Why can’t a framework just create my data objects, along with nice RESTful CRUD operations for each. Why, crow, why?! So at least for the moment, finding ActiveObjects is lemonade to quench my thirst for answers.

If you want to replace the keys in an array there is no native php function that does this currently. So I wrote one. It takes the keys from the first array and replaces it with a new key. See code snippet below.

I took a ride on the way back machine to find something that is interesting to me. Even since Google first started their search engine in the 90’s they have kept the same consistent layout.

Below is a story (youtube) I made up in ASL which is similar to the 3 little pigs. However, since the invasion of technology into our daily lives, not just children but everyone has been affected by the explosion of social networking and instant gratification of timely communication. Text messages and Facebook devour our minds and time but we all still love it. It truly is Sophie’s choice for the previous, current and next generations.

I have created many websites and blogs. Many of which have diminished and faded away due to my lack of motivation, time and interest. In the end, my laziness has the last laugh and boredom dominates the website and eventually the dust settles in. So… why go to all that extra effort to setup another website if it is just going to flop? Perhaps this site will be different?