Migrating Mercurial Repos To Git

Posted on Posted in Tools

In August 2019, BitBucket – a popular cloud source code hosting and project management service run by Atlassian – announced that it was dropping support for Mercurial repositories. Mercurial is a distributed source control management tool similar to, but less popular than Git.

This move isn’t surprising. Mercurial has lost the popularity war with Git and BitBucket claims that less than 1% of new repositories on their service use Mercurial. The surprising thing is that BitBucket announced that they are deleting Mercurial repositories from their service as of June 2020. Leaving developers and companies who use Mercurial with less than one year to migrate.

This move by BitBucket seems inevitable, but the timeline and hard-deletion that BitBucket is giving their loyal customers seems harsh. For me, I have around 25 projects that need to be migrated.

Here’s how to do so, in a few easy steps!

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Multiple Apps on One Server With Mod-Rewrite

Posted on Posted in Learning, Servers

For small companies and freelance or solo developers, hosting can be an expense which adds up over time to a hefty bill. Whether you have several VPSes or shared-hosting accounts, it makes little sense to have multiple small, experimental, or low-traffic sites on their own servers. You could serve them from multiple subdomains or subdirectories, but yuck! Domains are cheap and I like the polish of having something on it’s own domain once it’s public.

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The State Of PHP Today

Posted on Posted in PHP

You may have heard a few rumors going around…

“PHP is just a scripting language.”

“It’s only used by beginners.”

“PHP always ends up as spaghetti code.”

“PHP is insecure.”

“Only the smartest, sexiest people use PHP.”

Ok, maybe that last one was me… but hear me out! Much like the old stereotype of “only nerds play video games”, PHP definitely earned a few unflattering labels many years ago. Times have changed and developers in the know tell a very different story. Just like all the cool kids now play Fortnite (do they? I don’t know), PHP is nearly unrecognisable from its days as the scripting language ‘Personal Home Page’.

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PHP Podcast Picks

Posted on Posted in Learning, PHP

There are a surprising number of PHP and web development podcasts available to us, which is a great sign of the language’s popularity and passionate developers. Podcasts are nice because they allow us to keep current and learn while on the go. My preference is listening to them while doing chores, turning otherwise boring time into a chance to improve my technical knowledge. Over the last year I’ve listened to several podcasts specifically about PHP and web development, and here are the ones I’ve been following: Continue reading “PHP Podcast Picks” →

Bite Sized Code Refactoring – Redundant DB Connections

Posted on Posted in PHP

I maintain and work on a number of legacy code applications. One of them has earned itself some refactoring. So I’ll try to share some of the changes I’ve been making to improve it. Today, a problem that’s bothered me for a while: the DB class connects to the database even if no queries are being used.

I should be thankful that this legacy app doesn’t have a bunch of mysqli_* calls all over the place. Back when I wrote it I at least had the presence of mind to wrap SQL functions in an abstraction class. So this change was quite easy to make.

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