86 posts tagged with "tips"

When you're working on a large codebase, soon or later you'll find some annotations like @TODO or // TODO put there by people (perhaps you) as a reminder for "Don't forget to (do something)...". And, for sure, these todos remain there months or years because, yup, the programmer forgot they were there.

Personally, I sometimes work on code and comment on the call to a particular method or block. Often during a debugging session (for example on Linux Bash scripts) but, danger, don't forget to remove the comments and return the code to its original state. In that situation, I add a comment like // TEMPORARY just before the first commented line.

The idea behind the Todo Tree vscode addon (you can find the download page here) is to summarise such annotations and display a dashboard with all TODOS, TOFIX, ... and your owns too.

This is just ... for fun.

As you know, MS DOS didn't make any differences between MyFile.txt, myfile.txt, MYFILE.txt since DOS isn't case sensitive.

If you don't believe me, just start notepad, type a few characters and save your work once as MyFile.txt then as myfile.txt then as MYFILE.txt. Then look to your folder, how many documents did you have ? Just one.

Under Linux, you would have had three files; not under DOS.

What if we asked DOS to change its ways?

So, no need to tell it anymore, I'm doing everything in Docker containers even coding (since I'm coding using devcontainers) but ... till now, I was using git on my host only.

I mean, I need git on my host because I should be able to clone a repository. But the question is: should I use git from my host except for git clone? Can I work in my container and from there do actions like a git push?

My current workflow is: from my host, I'm cloning a repo on my disk then I build Docker image(s), run container(s) and jump in it (like starting my devcontainer). I start too a console in my container to start processes, work on files, ...

From time to time, I push my changes to my versioning system (like Gitlab/GitHub) and here is the point: I need to exit my devcontainer (or use another console), go back to my host and run, from my host, commands like git add . && git commit -m "feat: The great feature I'm working on it" && git push.

Let's see how to improve this process and be able to run git commands from inside our container.

Did you know that using WinSCP, you can run a search on your FTP to find all the documents containing a given string? It's native in WinSCP; nothing more to install but...

However, it's insanely slow; let's see how we can do it better and almost instantaneous.

You like clean code, don't you? And you hate getting an email from your versioning tool (e.g. Github or GitLab) telling you that your last commit didn't go through, that the formatting of your code is bad; this is because you've left one space too many at the end of a line or you've used single quote instead of double (or the opposite), for example.

You've pushed your changes, already start to work on another activity, perhaps another project and boum, two hours after your last commit (because the CI server was working on a lot of pipelines before yours), boum, you get a Your last commit has failed, #gnagnagna. I hate it as much as I love clean code.

So, what should we do to avoid this?

The answer is simple! Before each push, we should run the same code analysis tools that are executed in the CI, i.e. phplint, php-cs-fixer, phpcbf, phan, phpstan, ... (for PHP) or pylint, mypy, prospector, black, ruff, ... (for Python) or shellcheck and shellformat (for Linux Bash) or ...

We should, but do we think about it every time? Unfortunately not.

Let's see how to correct this.

How about asking Docker to create the files it needs itself?

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know by now that you need a Dockerfile to describe how the Docker image should be created and what should be included in it, and very often you'll also need a composer.yaml file to explain how the container should be created, e.g. which port to map to, which volumes to use, and so on.

Imagine you've an existing PHP application and you don't want to create the files needed for the dockerization by hand.

You just want to very quickly and using a wizard, to be able to answer to some questions and hop, it's ready.

The docker init command is the one you're looking for.

See also Markdown - Convert Excel ranges to Markdown tables.

Next to my XLS2MD script, you can also convert CSV file to Markdown very easily.

Just copy/paste your CSV content like the one below on the main text area appearing on Markdown - Convert CSV to Markdown tables and enjoy.

Column 1 Header,Column 2 Header
Row 1-1,Row 1-2
Row 2-1,Row 2-2

See also Markdown - Convert CSV to Markdown tables.

I'm a big fan of Markdown for my documentation, and from time to time I have to convert a range in Excel into a table to copy and paste into my documentation.

Years ago, I've found this repo https://github.com/jonmagic/copy-excel-paste-markdown and it's was the trigger for creating an online application in VueJS to make the magic happens.

In practical terms, I open my Excel file, select a range (a series of columns and rows) f.i. $A$1:$J:$50, press CTRL+C on the keyboard, switch to my Markdown - Convert Excel ranges to Markdown tables website, press CTRL+V and the table is converted.

You're recovering some old PHP code; you want to answer a question asked on a forum and the person who posted the PHP question didn't take care to ensure that it was properly formatted; ... there are too many occasions when the syntactic quality of a code can be rotten.

You'd like to have an online tool that you can use to quickly retrieve code with a much more polished layout, just by copying and pasting. Without having to install anything and without any headaches.

For example, how do you make the code below look cleaner in five seconds?

<?php
abstract class mycollection implements Iterator
{
    protected function populate($array, $dataobject){
foreach($array as $item){
            $object = new $dataobject();
            foreach($item as $key => $val){$object->$key = $val;}
  $this->storage[] = $object;
}}
}

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on a Python script that generates PDFs. My script had to generate 70,000 of them and that obviously takes a while.

My idea was to have my script run in a Linux console and, in a second console, with a counter that increases with the number of files that have been created on the hard disk.

The first script will be in Python and I wanted something ultra-simple and using a simple Linux command.

The command ls folder_name | wc -l works but didn't stay running. Let's see how we can do better with inotifywait.