Articles in category: English
Google from zero to infinite
Sometimes I do a full immersion on topics of my interest, generally related to programming, topics on testing, good design, etc.
I apply a technique invented by me named: “Google from zero to infinite”.
Basically I use one or more keywords in Google, then I literally follow all the links of all the pages. It is a very long and laborious activity. However, most of the time I find very interesting documents, otherwise difficult to reach. This time I decided to use the final keyword of PHP.
Introduction
Operators are useful constructors and they are present in most programming languages. They are fundamental for many operations and in this article we will provide an overview to better understand their properties.
This article is the first in a series of two about operators. Here we will make an overview of the main operators’ properties and in the next one we will discuss about some custom operators that we use in our production code.
When we use RabbitMQ and our project is in PHP, we have to run a Consumer and we could encounter some common and still unresolved problems.
In order to implement RabbitMQ in the project, there are different ready to use packages, especially when we use a framework like Symfony or Laravel. Usually these packages provide the full integration needed for the AMQP protocol, so we can easily configure it and create a Producer and a Consumer; then, we have to create a little script that will supervise the PHP process in order to make sure that all our consumers are running.
In the last month, I’m working on two different PHP projects here at Facile.it: in the first one, which is new and still in development, I decided to adopt GitLab CI for the build, since we use GitLab CE for our Git repositories; I then created a continuous deployment pipeline for the staging environment, directly to a Kubernetes cluster, leveraging Docker Compose to make the configuration easier.
After, I decided to start migrating a previous, internal project of mine to the same approach, since it’s currently in production with a dumb approach that provokes some downtime during deployments; on the contrary, doing a rolling deployment with Kubernetes is surprisingly easy!
Abstract
Upon migrating to a new infrastructure we started experiencing cache issues after each deploy: as we refreshed pages that were updated by the new release, we didn’t see the right content for a very short period of time. Initially, we wrongly assumed that the cause of this issue was the PHP OPcache extension but, after our investigation, we understood that real path cache was the culprit.
Introduction
When I started my software developer career, I was very surprised to read the following sentence, attributed to Phil Karlton: «There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things». In the beginning I was incredulous, because I didn’t really get the sense of these words. Not much later, I started to understand.
