Christian Engvall

pagodabox is a good alternative to host a Symfony2 site. When updating it all you need to do is commit to your master branch and push it to pagodabox, then clear the cache via ssh to deploy the site. But the last step can be automated with an after deploy hook.

An after deploy hook is is added in the boxfile and all we need to add is this:

after_deploy: - “rm -R app/cache/”

Update: Tobias Sjösten (thanks for the tip!) had an improvement to the hook, and it is to use symfonys console tool to clear the cache like this:

after_deploy:

• “php app/console cache:clear –env=prod –no-debug”

Boxfile example

An example of a boxfile with after_deploy hook included:

web1:
  ################################################
  ## GENERAL SETTINGS
  ################################################
  shared_writable_dirs:
      - app/cache
      - app/logs

  ################################################
  ## WEB SPECIFIC SETTINGS
  ################################################
  document_root: web
  default_gateway: app.php
  index_list: [app.php]

  ################################################
  ## PHP SPECIFIC SETTINGS
  ################################################
  php_version: 5.3.5
  php_extensions:
    - intl
    - mbstring
    - xsl
    - apc
    - mysql
    - posix
    - iconv
    - tokenizer
    - xml
    - pdo_mysql
  php_session_autostart: Off
  php_short_open_tag: Off
  magic_quotes_gpc: Off
  after_deploy:
    - "php app/console cache:clear --env=prod --no-debug"

How to build a github by Zach Holman

Zach Holman talks about how github has changed since the start but also interesting parts how github works to get employees to stay at their company, and so far no employee has left. The most interesting part was about how they automate tasks and deploy new things every day.

Clean code by Robert C. Martin

Robert C. Martin gives an introduction of how to write clean code at Oredev 2008.

Keep your goals to yourself by Derek Sivers

This 3 minute TEDtalk is not developer specific but what Derek has to say helps getting things done. It doesn’t matter if it’s a work related goal, a goal to run a marathon or getting a side project deployed.

With Static HTML: iframe tabs you can add static html to a Facebook page. This simple walkthrough(hello world) assumes you know how to create a page or already have a page to add a tab to and also simple html and css knowledge.

1. Add static HTML:iframe tabs to your page

Log in to your facebook account where you are admin for a page. Then browse to this url: http://apps.facebook.com/static_html_plus/ and click Add static html to a page. Then choose which of your pages to add it to.

Add static html

When this is done you will be redirected to your page and a tab name welcome has been added. In the next step we will change the picture and rename the tab.

Startpage

2. Update name and image of the new tab

Go to Admin Panel -> Edit Page -> and click on Update Info. Then click on apps in the menu to the left.

Admin panel

When you’ve clicked on apps you will se all the added apps for your page. Click on Edit Settings for the _ Static HTML: iframe tabs _ app.

Static html settings

A new window will appear where you can set Custom tab image and Custom tab name. When you are done with uploading a image and setting the name of the tab click Save and then click OK.

iframe tabs settings

3. Adding content

Go to the start of the page and click on the new tab, which you just renamed and edited the image of. In this case My own tab.

My own tab

You will now see the startscreen of the new tab. Where you can edit settings and add more tabs if you want to. But you can also choose to edit public content and fan content. Public content is shown for everyone and fan content is shown for people who has clicked like on your page. Click on Edit next to Public content.

Edit tab

Next we will get a question which kind of tab/app we want to create. In this tutorial we choose HTML i recommend you play around with the other ones to but for now click on Use this app under html and click on _done _ at the top of the page.

apps

In the _ index.html tab_ we add this code and click on save and publish : the [[style.css]] tag indicates that we want to use the css found in the style.css tab.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="sv">
 <head>
 <title>Something</title>
 [[style.css]]
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 </head>
<body>
<div class="crappyredtext">Hello world!</div>
</body>
</html>

And in the style.css tab you add this simple css class and click on save and publish:

.crappyredtext
{
  color:red;
}

Content

Now if you go back to the start page and click on your tab you will see Hello World! in red.

I’m always looking for resources that can help me become a better developer. This is a list of books that i’ve read or planning to read. The books are interesting to any developer regarding what language they use.

Developer books

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin “Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Clean coder - Robert C. Martin “In The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers, legendary software expert Robert C. Martin introduces the disciplines, techniques, tools, and practices of true software craftsmanship. This book is packed with practical advice–about everything from estimating and coding to refactoring and testing. It covers much more than technique: It is about attitude.”

Domain driven design quickly - Eric Evans  ”Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for dealing with highly complex domains that is based on making the domain itself the main focus of the project, and maintaining a software model that reflects a deep understanding of the domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans’ original book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson’s Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums. The main topics covered in the book include: Building Domain Knowledge, The Ubiquitous Language, Model Driven Design, Refactoring Toward Deeper Insight, and Preserving Model Integrity.”

Refactoring - Martin Fowler “Refactoring is about improving the design of existing code. It is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure. With refactoring you can even take a bad design and rework it into a good one.”

The art of unit testing - Roy Osherove “The Art of Unit Testing builds on top of what’s already been written about this important topic. It guides you step by step from simple tests to tests that are maintainable, readable, and trustworthy. It covers advanced subjects like mocks, stubs, and frameworks such as Typemock Isolator and Rhino Mocks. And you’ll learn about advanced test patterns and organization, working with legacy code and even untestable code. The book discusses tools you need when testing databases and other technologies. It’s written for .NET developers but others will also benefit from this book.” 

97 things every programmer should know - Kevlin Henney “Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every programmer should know, no matter what language you use. With the 97 short and extremely useful tips for programmers in this book, you’ll expand your skills by adopting new approaches to old problems, learning appropriate best practices, and honing your craft through sound advice.”

I recently held a presentation about Clean code at Sogeti and thought i’d recap the important parts in a post. The slides can be found on prezi.

The length of a method

A method should be as small as possible, about 3 to 6 lines of code.  The method should never be more the 10 lines of code. It should also only do one thing.

Names

The name of a method should explain what the method does, and this gets simple since the method should only do one thing. Don’t be afraid to make the method name long, make sure to use a naming convention that allows multiple words in it.

The name of a variable should explain what the contents of the variable is. Bad name:

int d; //Elapsed time in days

good name:

int =  elapsedTimeInDays;

Do not use any abbrevations, they might be simple for you to understand but when another developer comes into your code he might not know what the abbrevation means.

Arguments

A method should not accept more than three arguments, if you go over that number maybe you should think about making an object that contains these arguments as a property. 

Don’t use out arguments. When we read code we usually dont expect information to comeback from the arguments.

Don’t use booleans as arguments. if you do the method you’re writing will probably do more than one thing, depending if the boolean is true or false. And if you se a call to a method like this:

DeleteEmployee(“Bob”, false, true);

you will have to go into the method to know what it does with the true and false, instead of continue reading.

Comments

Do not comment code. The method name should explain what the method does. A comment will probably not get updated when the code is changed therefore the comment will be outdated and only confuse other developers. If you se outocmmented code just delete it. If you need it later it will always be in the version control.

If, else, while, foreach and try catch

The body of a if/else, while foreach and try catch should always be one line long and it should call another method. This is to keep the method small and the code will document itself with the methodname. Examples:

if(myBool){
    callToMethod();
}
else{
    callToAnotherMethod();
}

try{
    DeleteCustomer();
}
catch(Exception error){
    logger.log(error);
}

Do not return null

If a method encounters a problem and you decide to return null you’re going to have a lot of null checks in the code that calls this method. This is unnecessary, instead return a variable that is empty, for example:

List<Employee> employees = getEmployees();
if(employees != null){
    foreach(employee in employees){
        employees.raiseSalary();
    }
}

if getEmployees() would return a empty list of employee when an error occured in that method we wouldn’t need to check for null and our methodcall could look like this:

List<Employee> employees = getEmployees();
foreach(employee in employees){
    employees.raiseSalary();
}

These are only a few tips from clean code, i recommend you buy the book or take a look at Robert C. Martins code-cast about clean code.