Martin Joiner's Blog Writing about software development, climbing and life.

Category: Software

30 December 2019
Martin speaking at event

Dependency Version Constraints Talk at PHP SW

In November 2019 I delivered a talk at Bristol tech meetup PHP South West covering a small but very useful piece of knowledge. NPM and Composer kind of hit critical popularity at the same time. By 2013/14 a package manager was an integral part of web development if you wanted to use all the shiny […]… Read more »
Category: Software
4 May 2018
Martin stood in front of presentation screen

Speedy Seeding: Lightning talk at PHP SW

Earlier this month I spoke at local developer meetup PHP South West. My lightning talk at focussed on making seeding loads of data quick and painless so as not to discourage yourself from optimising your application.… Read more »
Category: Software
31 August 2017

Why I think it’s fine to ask a mobile user to “Click”

I wrote a guest opinion piece for TechSpark, check it out: https://techspark.co/fine-ask-mobile-user-click/… Read more »
Category: Software
5 July 2017

A pre-commit hook to block tab-indented code

Avoiding tab-indentation is the best way to ensure code looks the same on all code editors/viewers including Mac, Windows, Vim and the GitHub website. I made a Git pre-commit hook that lints your newly added lines for tab indentation and stops the commit if it finds any.… Read more »
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13 February 2017

Jade Templating Engine Renamed to Pug

Playing with the Express framework on a Node.js project I was encouraged by Express's documentation to bootstrap my new project with the Jade templating engine. I'd never used Jade before but I liked what came out the box! Diving deeper and hungry for official documentation I searched the term "jade templating" on duckduckgo.com and scanned my […]… Read more »
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2 February 2017

Utilising the GoodReads API on BookFetch

The biggest problem revealed after Saturdays test of the BookFetch scanner was the systems inability to lookup 60% of the scanned barcodes on the ISBNdb.com API. Owen, a friend in the local Bristol tech community suggested giving GoodReads.com's API a try. I added a fallback in the code that processes the scans so that if it should […]… Read more »
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28 January 2017
Martin using BookFetch scanner

BookFetch scanner tested in the wild

In the 2 shops that did let me test the system I was able to establish that all the books in a single shop could be scanned in about 20 minutes.… Read more »
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23 January 2017

Abandoning Drupal 8 to rebuild BookFetch in Laravel 5

Back in October I started building the BookFetch project from scratch and used it as an excuse to learn Drupal 8. My experience of developing in Drupal 8 has been utterly horrible, full of moments of horror, frowning at the raw results, resigned to a helpless moan of "Why are you doing it like that?!". […]… Read more »
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16 January 2017

Adventures in static site generation

Here's a fact: A static web page like 'about-me.html' is stored in a simple text file so when a browser requests it from the web server it just has to open the file and send the contents back. It's a pretty fast operation. But a dynamic page like 'about-me.php' contains code that needs to be pre-processed […]… Read more »
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27 October 2016

To style before testing?

I've built an early working version of both the scanner end of the BookFetch project and the public-facing website part, but at this stage the visual styling is just Drupal's default out-the-box theme. But that doesn't matter right? Just get it out there, MVP man, stop wasting time yeah?! No. Because the next stage will […]… Read more »
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