Category: Development Tools

Categories
Development Tools

Open Source Projects That I Rely On To Effectively Do My Job – Part 3

There are a number of things that exist in the open source world without which I do no think I could do my Job. I am a Web Developer. I work on a range of projects using different systems, languages and processes. I work a lot with WordPress as well.

Many aspects of my work revolve around scanning logs, writing and reading code in a text editor and browsing the internet. I have my prefered programs for doing each of those tasks.

This is a set of articles that look at a lof of the open source projects that I rely on to do my job and do it effectively.

Online Applications

Some of the tools I use are online services or applications. In the open source world people build things and they share them. Since I am in the web developer sphere that means a lot of the circles I am in people build online software.

Online software is convenient because they are more portable and often accessible from a variety of devices. A lot of online services are powered by open source software (and that's not counting the unlaying OS or the fact that it probably uses Apache or NGINX to respond to people's browsers).

WordPress

A lot of the work that I do relates back to WordPress in some way. It powers a huge amount of the publicly accessible internet. Sometimes I build for WP or extend it, other times I build things to work alongside it. Sometimes I just build server stacks capable of running it.

If WordPress was closed source, or did not exist, a god portion of my work would not come in.

GitHub – And Git

GitHub is a giant when it comes to source code management. GitHub manages code using an unlaying software called git. That software was started by the same man who started the linux kernel.

GitHub itself is not an open source application. I can't download a copy of it and run my own private version of it (but you can have private instances setup and managed by them, either hosted in the cloud or in-house). It is powered by an open software and also values open source greatly. Most projects hosted there are under some kind of open licence.

Other Online Git Services – BitBucket, GitLab

There are other repo hosts available. Bitbucket is a good choice. GitLab is also a good choice.

GitLab is an online service where you can host your code as well but it's an open software too. You can download it to run on your own server managed by yourself. It is extremely full featured – offering much of the same as github and bitbucket – as well as a lot of integrated CI and tooling.

Communications – Slack

Even talking to yourself can be useful at times, communication is better when more people can be involved and the conversations can be archived and searched. Slack lets that happen. It's actually not an open source project as such but a tool for communication that isn't email is essential when working online with others. 

Conversations happen in Chat Rooms. Slack provides nice rooms to have those conversations.

Categories
Development Tools

Open Source Projects That I Rely On To Effectively Do My Job – Part 2

There are a number of things that exist in the open source world without which I do no think I could do my Job. I am a Web Developer. I work on a range of projects using different systems, languages and processes. I work a lot with WordPress as well.

Many aspects of my work revolve around scanning logs, writing and reading code in a text editor and browsing the internet. I have my prefered programs for doing each of those tasks.

This is a set of articles that look at a lof of the open source projects that I rely on to do my job and do it effectively.

Software And Tool Choices

My job consists of 3 primary task types and I have my preference of what software to use for each of the tasks.

  • Analysing log files.
  • Reading and writing code.
  • Browsing the internet.

Most of the time I opt for open source over closed and choose cross-platform options where available.

Browser Choice – Chrome/Firefox

As a browser I want to say I use a fully open software. I do not. I use Google Chrome primarily (Firefox secondary which is open source though. Half a point for that maybe???).

Chrome is based on the open source Chromium so it's origins are open. It may also still follow Chromium as upstream. I use Chromium on minimal virtual machines but not often.

There is tracking and closed systems built into Chrome which I make use of. Cloud syncing is useful for me.

Chrome is not fully open but it was forked from open software and for me the closed source parts are an acceptable drawback.

Plus it's the most popular browser choice from users. I need to see the web in the same way that most people see it.

Reading and Writing Code – Atom 

Reading and writing code I do in Atom Editor. It's fully open, started internally at Github and is built by them and others to be the best open source editor it can be. 

For anyone working in with code and do not need a special proprietary IDE (most people working with code) for a given purpose I highly recommend Atom. It's well maintained, constantly developed and improved based on the needs of developers using it.

Atom is built with a framework called Electron (again open, from Github) which helps compile and run JavaScript (Node) as desktop applications and allows building for desktop to be very akin to building for the web meaning transferable skills for developers.

If Atom didn't exist I would use Lime Text (OSS variant of Sublime Text) or Notepad++.

Scanning Logs – Terminal and BASH

I do a lot of work in the terminal. Often in several terminals at the same time. Working with them using CLI is actually an incredible way to multi-task and effectively monitor progress. Most of the time when on command line I'm using BASH syntax. Sometimes it's powerShell… let's avoid that conversation lol!

I use Ubuntu as my main dev machine. Ubuntu ships with terminals that run BASH. Most Linux OS run BASH as well so connection to another machines command line is familiar regardless of what machine.

Logs are usually files containing plain text. Many command line tools exist to read through text files. An incredibly useful tool is called grep. It is used to search input for strings or regex matches.

Categories
Development Tools

Open Source Projects That I Rely On To Effectively Do My Job – Part 1

There are a number of things that exist in the open source world without which I do no think I could do my Job. I am a Web Developer. I work on a range of projects using different systems, languages and processes. I work a lot with WordPress as well.

Many aspects of my work revolve around scanning logs, writing and reading code in a text editor and browsing the internet. I have my prefered programs for doing each of those tasks.

This is a set of articles that look at a lof of the open source projects that I rely on to do my job and do it effectively.

Open Source Operating Systems and Server Software

A lot of open source code is enabled by other software, tools, specifications and systems that are also open source. The most obvious enabler is the availability of open source Operating Systems. These are used on local machines but even more common in infrastructure powering systems and services.

Operating Systems

Open Source OS are only possible because of the ability to take many other pieces of OSS and link or modify it in such a way that it works well together as a whole.

I mainly use Linux OS. Ubuntu, Cent OS, CoreOS, Arch. At the heart of them all is the Linux Kernel. All open, all developed in public.

Server Software – Specifically HTTP Servers

Another specific type of software that I rely on is HTTP servers. These servers allow requests and responses to be made between clients and servers – in a user friendly way returning the rich content we expect on the web today.

There are 2 specific softwares that dominate the http server domain. Apache and NGINX. 

I'd take a guess at 75% or more of all http requests made over the internet would be responded to by one or the other.

Without both OSs and HTTP servers being available as open source I doubt that the web would be what it is. I expect my job may not exist.

PHP & JavaScript

WordPress is primarily written in PHP with many JavaScript components for use in the browser. PHP is itself an open source language and JavaScript is an open specification.

Coding for WordPress most of the time involves working with pure PHP or JavaScript and then hooking that code into WP with some more code.

MySQL

The application layer of most applications, including WordPress, connect to a data layer that is often a MySQL database. MySQL is another open source project (although at the time of MariaDB creation that was very up in arms).

Node

Node is another popular system that I work with a lot. Essentially it runs JavaScript without a browser.

Many people are first introduced to Node as part of build tools – especially since the usage of task runnings become more popular. Grunt and Gulp run in Node. If you've ever ran a npm install command you've used Node.

Categories
Development Tools

Automate All The things With Grunt

I’ve recently become a fan of Grunt. It’s a JavaScript task runner that get installed within a project to handle jobs for the project. For me it’s extremely useful for a whole range of things – even in just a short 2 weeks I’ve got so much more value from using it than I ever expected.

If you’re a developer of any kind then Grunt is something that you could probably benefit from using. The reason? This is the reason they give on their homepage:

In one word: automation.

On it’s own Grunt doesn’t do a lot – it runs tasks but you need to define those tasks for it to be useful.

Tasks are defined by plugins installed alongside Grunt. There’s already thousands of plugins created that do many of the things that you might need (4,403 of them at time of writing). Many of them are officially maintained by the team at Grunt, so you can guarantee a decent level of support or documentation will be available.

Grunt for WordPress Development

I mostly work on WordPress projects. PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is what I deal with daily. Grunt has MANY tasks available for working with those. There’s 2 specific things that are extremely useful.

Linting

Linting is the process of parsing your code and making sure it complies with a set of predefined rules. It can parse for errors as well as coding standards and all of the major code types used in WordPress can be linted with readily available tools.

Being notified of errors in code as they are introduced can save many hours of debugging.

Combine + Minify

Making sure you have comments in your files so you know what’s happening at a given point is good practice. It’s also good practice to serve optimized files to users – in as few requests and bytes as possible.

Combining your styles and scripts reduces the amount of requests needed and eliminates any overheads associated with additional requests. Minfying them as well will make sure you’re sending only the data that you need.

Making sure your images are optimized or compressed as well can save a lot of unnecessary transfer. You can have Grunt handle that for you too.

Watching for Changes

Since automation is the name of the game you can make use of the Watch task. It watches for changes to your files and when it detects them goes ahead and runs certain tasks. As a starting point watching your styles and scripts for changes then recompiling them could save you hours of time to spend on doing more useful things in your project.