Category: Development

De-Enshittify and Remove AI

Posted on Posted in AI, Development, Technology

This will be a living document for me to record and save all the methods I’ve used to remove AI from search, browsers, software and other aspects of my digital life, in the cases where it’s getting in my way. I honestly can’t believe how much it’s being shoved down our throats and how hard it’s getting to keep my kids from being slowly enveloped by this molasses of “don’t think, we’ll do it for you” and “don’t look at what other humans have made, let us summarize and recreate it for you.” No thanks.

Continue reading “De-Enshittify and Remove AI” →

Web Accessibility Roundup

Posted on Posted in Development

This is a summary of my notes taken during a Web Accessibility seminar hosted by Hackforge and taught by Jason Pomerleau. This is mostly in short-hand and only touches on main/common topics.

WCAG 2.0 is the baseline standard. Level AA is what most legislation targets.

Common Considerations

  • Visual Impairment
  • Colourblindness
  • Hearing Impairment
  • Mobility/Tremors
  • Cognitive Impairment
  • Seizures/Motion Sickness
Continue reading “Web Accessibility Roundup” →

What Happened To DarkLang?

Posted on Posted in Development, Tools

Three years ago I wrote a post exploring the new integrated programming language, environment, online editor and pipeline called Dark. I thought it looked pretty cool but lacked a lot of necessary features that would make it useful at business scale, and it also came with major vendor lock-in risk. I concluded by planning to look back at it in a year or two. I did so and, woo, do I have some concerns.

Continue reading “What Happened To DarkLang?” →

Keeping Symfony Projects Up To Date

Posted on Posted in Development, PHP, Symfony

Keeping any project which uses a framework or a collection of 3rd party libraries up to date is an exercise in continuous upgrades. In my situation, I have dozens of projects on a variety of internal and 3rd party frameworks, so keeping everything updated – from the PHP version to the framework and library versions – is an important and time consuming process. Here are some strategies and techniques.

Continue reading “Keeping Symfony Projects Up To Date” →

Custom Error Pages in Symfony Framework

Posted on Posted in Development, PHP

As I make my way through some tutorials on SymfonyCasts and begin a re-write of my SyntaxSeed website from CodeIgniter to Symfony… I occasionally encounter something that took a bit more struggle than a simple web search. This is one of those tasks.

Symfony gives you some generic built in error pages, for example when you get a 404 missing resource error or a 500 error. When working in your dev environment you don’t see these, you instead get the nice Whoops error pages with extra details. Customizing the error pages requires a few steps.

Continue reading “Custom Error Pages in Symfony Framework” →

Learn PHP For Experienced Developers

Posted on Posted in Development, Learning, PHP

In my efforts to help a colleague, I discovered that there are few resources for people who are already programmers in other languages to learn PHP. Something that isn’t beginner level, doesn’t explain basic programming concepts… just get to the heart of what makes PHP unique, and some suggested quality resources to learn more.

This is what I’ve written here. It’s a high-level overview of the language, and some vetted resources to get set up and learn more.

Let’s get started…

Continue reading “Learn PHP For Experienced Developers” →

Let’s Talk About: Coercive Software Design

Posted on Posted in Development

We become developers with the understanding that our mission with the software we create is to meet the needs of users. But what happens when the software we create is being used to change or coerce the behaviour of users, rather than help them work, play and behave the way they want to? What are the ethical considerations of developing software that tries to manipulate users? Where does the profit-driven motivation go too far?

Coercive: using force to persuade people to do things that they are unwilling to do. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Continue reading “Let’s Talk About: Coercive Software Design” →