I don’t often review pull requests that come from non-origin remotes. This is largely because Automattic tends to create pull requests in the root repository. So, when I reviewed a pull request from an open source contributor today, I found myself wandering if there was a simple way to checkout the pull request locally for … Read more
At Automattic, many teams have a process where they post weekly, or biweekly, updates. One of the things that I’ve often found difficult, as I write my personal update, is remembering all of the little things that I did for the past week. Sure, since I work on the computer, there’s usually some paper trail … Read more
I use Unison to sync code between my local machine and my dev servers. To sync between two servers, it requires that the same version of Unison be installed on both servers. Now, this isn’t usually a big deal, because once you get Unison set up, it’s set up. But, I usually get a bit … Read more
I recently ran into an issue where JSON encoding some objects in my code wasn’t working properly. After experimenting, I realized that casting everything to an array before JSON encoding magically fixed things. Casting an object to an array is simple enough: But, what happens when an object or array contains references to other objects … Read more
At Automattic, we use SVN and Phabricator for much of our source control needs. One issue that I often run into is a warning about untracked files when creating a Phabricator differential: This warning’s purpose is to make sure that the differential being created has ALL of the changes so that a file isn’t forgotten … Read more
Over the past year, there have been a couple of times where I've needed to sort some large list of values, more than 100 million lines in one case. In each case, I was dealing with a data source where there was surely duplicate entries. For example, duplicate usernames, emails, or URLs. To address this, I … Read more
I remember the first time I saw a setTimeout( fn, 0 ) call in some React. Luckily there was a comment with the code, so I kind of had an idea of why that code was there. Even with the comment though, it was still confusing. Since then, I’ve read several articles about the event loop … Read more
For developing on remote servers, but using a local IDE, I prefer to use Unison over other methods that rely on syncing files via rsync or SFTP. But, one issue with Unison is that two computers must have the same version to sync. And since Homebrew installs Unison 2.48.4 and apt-get install unison installs something … Read more
When using Elasticsearch for reporting efforts, aggregations have been invaluable. Writing my first aggregation was pretty awesome. But, pretty soon after, I needed to figure out a way to run an aggregation over a filtered data set. As with learning all new things, I was clueless how to do this. Turns out, it’s quite easy. … Read more
While working on some functional tests for a hosting provider, I kept running into an issue where the login test was failing due to a 500 error. It appeared as if the site hadn’t been fully provisioned by the time my test was trying to login. Initially, I attempted adding timeouts to give the installation … Read more
Lately, I’ve been using the command line a lot more often at work. I found two things hard about using the command line to interact with PHP files: Figuring out the require path every time I opened an interactive shell Remember what methods were available in a class and what arguments the method expected The … Read more
I came across a really great article that compares changes in Google Maps and Apple Maps over a year. It’s really great to see how much Google is experimenting and improving their product. Similar to how a software engineer refactors their code before expanding it, Google has repeatedly refactored the styling of its map as … Read more