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Understanding How A Magento 1 Module Works

Published: January 11, 2017

As a developer, there’s a good chance you spend more time reading code than you do writing it. In the world of Magento, a lot of that time will be spent reading through the source code of custom and community modules.

In this post, I’ll provide some tips to help you understand how these modules work.

Why Local Profiling Alone Is Insufficient For Performance Optimization

Published: January 3, 2017

When your goal is to make a web site load faster, the first logical step is to hook your local development environment up to a tool like XHProf, or Blackfire. This is definitely a good thing to do to get some sense of how the code is executing and where the bottlenecks are. However, if this is the only thing you do to review performance, there’s a good chance you’re going to miss something. Let me tell you what else is needed and why.

A Level-Headed Assessment Of CVE-2016-10033 And CVE-2016-10045

Published: December 28, 2016

Titles like “Critical PHPMailer Flaw leaves Millions of Websites Vulnerable to Remote Exploit” or “PHPMailer Bug Leaves Millions of Websites Open to Attack” are great if you’re looking for clicks. However, when you take a closer look, you’ll see that these aren’t exactly accurate.

Blast radius of phpmailer was greatly hyped by bug author: requires app to use fairly sophisticated mail address validation (or none at all)

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) December 27, 2016

Here, I’ll take a level-headed look at recent vulnerabilities found in PHPMailer, CVE-2016-10033 and CVE-2016-10045.

Faster Search With ripgrep

Published: December 23, 2016

Between massive log files and big code bases, if you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time searching.

grep is typically the old standby here. I know I’ve used it just about every day for as long as I can remember.

However, there’s a new kid on the block that goes by the name of ripgrep (executable as rg) that’s really stirring things up. Let me show you what there is to like about ripgrep.

Skipping A Number In An HTML Ordered List

Published: December 21, 2016

When writing an ordered list, numbers usually go sequentially up from 1, to 2, to 3 and so on. Anyone with the most basic knowledge of HTML knows that these lists should be represented with the <ol> element.

Markup

<ol>
  <li>HTML</li>
  <li>CSS</li>
  <li>JavaScript</li>
</ol>

Result

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript

However, what happens when you want to skip a number?

In this post I’ll outline why one might want to do this and provide the solution for achieving the desired result.

A Review Of Emoji Usage In Technical Blogs

Published: December 20, 2016

A while back, I added emoji support to this blog. I’ve used it here and there since then, but not extensively. However, the addition got me interested in how other technical bloggers are using emoji on their sites.

Just for fun, I decided to do a deep dive on that topic, parsing through the source code of hundreds of blogs published on GitHub. There were three basic questions that I wanted to answer…

1. How often are technical bloggers using emoji?
2. Which emoji are used most frequently?
3. How are emoji used into blog posts?

Here, I’ll share the results of this digging for anyone else who is interested in this topic.