I’ve recently been working quite a bit on a worker application in python. This worker picks up tasks over a gRPC service executes those tasks, and publishes the results via gRPC. Because of python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), threads don’t help for CPU intensive workloads. Instead, I’m using multiprocessing to run additional processes per worker and get better CPU utilization at the cost of using a ton of memory. When a python process opens a child process it can also share state with the child process. The most interesting of these are synchronization and communication primitives like Event, Queue, Pipe, and Lock.

This Easter I had some time to dedicate to working through the rustling exercises. I still consider myself a novice rust developer. I frequently don’t know rust idioms, and spend a lot of time struggling to get an idea working at the fidelity of a prototype. Once I have something working, I’m able to revise and refine it incrementally, but getting the initial idea out is tough.

Recently, I’ve been working on a system that needs to run tasks scheduled by either web requests, or other tasks. These tasks are trusted but sometimes problematic code. While developers generally write good code, we all make mistakes and the occasional slow job that can run for multiple hours gets written. These slow tasks can create problems if the volume of them goes up as they can consume all available resources.

I wanted to share a new CakePHP plugin that provides feature flagging. In a Saas environment, I’ve been a long time advocate for using feature flags to release changes instead of deploys. Feature flags let you better manage release risk by allowing you deliver code with new features disabled.

I recently built a GitHub Application for Stickler CI and wanted to share what I learned along the way. While the documentation for GitHub Applications is pretty good there were a few things I struggled with.

In the next major release of CakePHP we’re going to be removing the AuthComponent. This component and its helpers have been part of CakePHP since the 1.2 days, but their time has come to an end. Over the years, AuthComponent has become a complex and difficult to extend piece of CakePHP. In its wake, we’re promoting two new plugins.

In this three part series, I’m going to cover the evolution of Stickler CI in the past 2 years from the initial prototype to the present day. This specific article will cover how I built the initial prototype and then added paid plans.

Stickler CI users have expressed that automatically enabling default linters can create a flood unwanted comments in pull requests, which is overwhelming and noisy. In response to these issues, we have changed the process of connecting a repository to Stickler CI.

Integration testing with external webservices, has historically been an uncomforable process in PHP for me. It frequently involves complicated mocking that was fragile and hard to maintain. I’ve long wished for a PHP library that was as simple to use as HTTPretty is in Python.

I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on over the past few months. Stickler-CI helps automate the tedious process of ensuring coding standards are followed during pull requests. Like many teams, FreshBooks uses pull requests as a way to solicit feedback from other developers, ensure consistent coding practices and catch bugs before they can cause real problems.

I’m excited to announce the availability of a PSR7 Bridge plugin for CakePHP. This plugin lets you bridge PSR7 Middleware with CakePHP 3.3+ applications.

While I’m a big fan of dependency injection, I find dependency injection containers less alluring. I’ve found that liberal usage of containers can make application code harder to follow, and often the container definitions go untested, creating a spawning pool for bugs.

I recently moved hosting for this blog and my wife’s site to a shiny new linode. I did this because I wanted to have control over the versions of PHP, and other server software I ran. I had some issues with email blacklists at my previous host. I chose linode as I’ve heard nothing but good things from friends and my operations folks at work recommended them.

Making sure your freshly released CakePHP plugin still passes all of its tests can be a bit of a time sink. Setting up Jenkins for small project can be a big job. After I setup Jenkins once or twice, I personally longed for a simple way to get continuous integration with not much work.

As webservices grow so does the need for being able to communicate with them in an easy fashion. This simple blog alone uses 2 webservices. The recent tracks at the bottom is a feed I pull from Last.fm and my spam protection is provided by Akismet. When first building my site I looked for an already built solution and found a partial solution in Felix Geisendörfer’s WebModel.