Ran into a scenario this weekend where I needed to take a sub-document from Mongo but I needed it in an array in PHP. Reading the data from Mongo with PHP was simple and won’t be discussed. What I’d like to talk about is taking the BSONDocument that Mongo returns
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Recently I set out on an interesting journey. I wanted to build programming libraries for my API, HolidayAPI. Some of the languages I know like the back of my hand. Others, have never even touched them before. Before you start sending me hate comment, I am fully aware of Swagger.
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If you’re like me, there’s a great chance that you have not only some public dotfiles but you also have some private stuff you don’t want the world to have open access to. I refer to these private dotfiles simple as dotprivate. I include my dotprivate files as a submodule
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Now that my buddy Justin is back to using vim, he’s been flooding me with questions. Loljk, but he did ask about setting the tab spacing based on the type of file he was working with. Incidentally, this was something I had just improved in my dotfiles. Back before I
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Typical of PHP, it’s very easy to get the day of the week from a date, but they also provide the data in multiple format. Three in fact. The first, and arguably the most straight forward is to get the textual name of the day of the week. <?php echo
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Before PHP 5.3, finding the difference between two dates was a bit of a pain. Convert the date strings to UNIX timestamps (if they weren’t already), subtract them, and then divide the result until you had each of the components (seconds, minutes, et cetera). As of PHP 5.3+ you can
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I get it, you got a metric shit ton of stuff going on at work and open source contributions aren’t necessarily one of them. Bet there’s a good chance you have at least one side project though. Also bet there’s a good chance that you don’t make open source contributions
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Regardless of your religious beliefs, you are probably aware that Easter Sunday occurs on a sliding scale. This is because Easter is a moveable feast and the date is determined by a lunisolar calendar. Originally I was planning to talk about how to calculate the date of Easter in Javascript.
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The other day I had posted on capitalizing the first letter of a string in JavaScript. But what if you wanted to capitalize the first letter of every word? With PHP it’s just a simple call to ucwords and just as easy in Ruby and Python. To be able to
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If you’re reading this then you where probably slapped by MailChimp’s latest announcement to merge Mandrill into MailChimp. You may be outraged because you were on their free tier which is going away. Personally I don’t agree with your rage. In fact, I think you’re a freeloader. That being said,
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I’ve been implementing HubSpot’s Vex library as a replacement for stock alert(), confirm() and prompt() dialogs on SceneKids recently. In one use case, I wanted to be able to have 3 buttons on the dialog with each button returning a value, instead of just boolean true for the OK buttons.
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I’m still kind of spoiled by the built-in functions in PHP (as well as Ruby and Python for this particular task). Something like capitalizing the first letter of a string is a trivial task in most languages: <?php // Capitalize first letter with PHP ucfirst('some string that needs the first
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I do it, and I do it well. In fact, I’ve built an iOS game on it and used one exclusively without an external display while working at Sumo HQ in Austin, TX this past week. The 11” MacBook Air is a decent machine, even if you think the screen
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This probably isn’t the best way to track things, but it’s the best I came up with. Tracking the total number of users that log in per day or month is trivial as I have discussed in a previous post. To track the peak users online at a given time
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Validating that an email addresses ain’t what it used to be. I remember writing simple regular expressions that worked out really well. These days there are a bajillion TLDs with more being added all of the time. Something I started doing is checking that the domain of the email being
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Checking if a string contains a character could be accomplished easily with a regular expression or you can use the built-in PHP functions. To check if a string contains a character of a specific case you can use strpos. $haystack = 'This is my haystack that we shall check' $has_A
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There’s many ways to skin a cat, or generate a color. You could randomize a number between 0 and 16777215 then convert it to hex: $rand_color = '#' . dechex(mt_rant(0, 16777215)); Or you could do what I like to do, just md5 a random string and grab the first 6
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Sometimes, you may want to run code all of the time. Other times, you may want to run code some of the time. This is how garbage collection in PHP works. Based on your configuration for gc_probability and gc_divisor, garbage collections runs a fraction of the time (defaulting to 1/100
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Seems that every time that Apple releases a new version of iOS I encounter some weird rendering issue. This time around with iOS9 I encountered an issue where the full / desktop version of the site looked like it still using some of the mobile / smaller device stylings. After
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A few years back I wrote about my experiences contributing to and maintaining open source projects. Since then, I’ve done my share of forking, pull requesting and even starting up new projects that people are forking and pull requesting. I make a very conscious effort to contribute to projects that
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Recently I was building a piece of functionality to track the daily and monthly active users on one of my sites. I already track this data in MySQL but retrieving the data was sluggish, even after creating a few new indexes, so I decided that I would use Redis. The
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This is probably one of the most rotten experiments I have done in recent times. I wanted to see what would happen if I blocked site usage from folks using ad blocking software. Would it cause a stir? Would people figure out that their ad blocker is to blame? Would
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Project Honey Pot is one of my favorite services. They offer an API that allows you to pull information on an IP address. This comes in very handy when vetting traffic coming to your website. I discovered the service a few years back after realizing that I had some spammers
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Converting a string to a timestamp is one of my favorite things about PHP. In fact when trying to decide which language to build [HolidayAPI][holidayapi] in I couldn’t find an implementation of PHP’s strtotime() that rivaled the original. The strtotime() function takes a textual string as input and then spits
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PHP arrays are absolutely fantastic. They hold stuff, doesn’t really matter what. The interfacing is pretty consistent and there’s a boat load of built-in array functions. What PHP lacks is the ability to set the array pointer to an arbitrary key or value. There are ways to move forward and
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