Gary Bell | Building software. Leading teams.

Version 2.2.0 of my PHP Password Validator [__GHOST_URL__/projects/] has been released.

Welcome to Tanuki Tuesday [__GHOST_URL__/tag/tanuki-tuesday/], where I look at the features offered by GitLab.

I need to open by saying that this is not a guarantee of the actual demise of a product, rather my view on why it is obsolete.

Welcome to Tanuki Tuesday, where I look at the features offered by GitLab.

With the release of PHP8, there's going to be a scramble from people to get their PHP applications up-to-date.

Welcome to Tanuki Tuesday [__GHOST_URL__/tag/tanuki-tuesday/], where I look at the features offered by GitLab.

It's the start of a new year, and a time when new resolutions come to people.

Welcome to Tanuki Tuesday [__GHOST_URL__/tag/tanuki-tuesday/], where I look at the features offered by GitLab.

This is an entirely self-serving post, and is only about what I plan to achieve in 2021.

Short announcement about my PHP Password Validator project [__GHOST_URL__/projects/].

It's come to that time of year when things get busy for a lot of people, due to spending time with family, and scrambling round to find presents.

I've recently been trying to update NodeJS and NPM on a couple of my machines.

I read a post on dev.to about how most websites validate passwords incorrectly.

A week ago I looked at upgrading to Composer 2 [__GHOST_URL__/upgrading-to-composer-2/] on a couple of machines.

One of my projects [__GHOST_URL__/projects/] is a password validator for PHP which uses the entropy of a password to determine its strength.

If you develop using PHP, there's a very high probability you've come across Composer, the PHP dependency manager.

Black Friday is right around the corner.

I've previously written about why you should use virtual machines for development [__GHOST_URL__/why-you-should-use-virtual-machines-in-development/], but…

You've set up a Droplet in DigitalOcean and locked things down to restrict access to it via the firewall.

I'm a huge fan of GitLab, and make no secret of it.

If you work with PHP for projects, there's a good chance you work with Composer as a package manager, and therefore have a composer.json file.

Setting up a webserver for a PHP site is relatively straightforward for a basic configuration.

The holy grail for any website is hitting that number 1 spot in Google.

I do most of my coding in PHP.

Are your pipelines stuck forever waiting one one job to finish?

As part of my development workflow, I use gulp to build the Javascript and CSS files for production.

I've previously covered the issues of using a CMS [__GHOST_URL__/issues-with-using-a-cms/], and that they require a lot of work to keep up-to-date.

Anyone who has done any real coding is likely to have seen an exception message, and/or a stack trace which comes with it.

Let me start by saying I'm not a fan of Apple.

Following my post on why passwords shouldn't be limited in length [__GHOST_URL__/disk-space-is-cheap-data-breaches-are-not/], I have decided to name and…

Many, many years ago (way back in 2015), I wrote an article about keeping data secure [__GHOST_URL__/keeping-data-secure/].

User Experience (UX) is something which has been around for a while.

Following the use of a Raspberry Pi for my backups [__GHOST_URL__/raspberry-pi-for-backups/], I decided to go ahead and install Pi Hole on the same device

I've previously written about my backups, the server they were running from, and the NAS drive problems i have had.

If you are a software developer of any sort, you really should use source control [__GHOST_URL__/why-i-use-gitlab/].

So you've decided you want to create a web project using Symfony 5.

This is going to be controversial.

Having previously defended technical tests [__GHOST_URL__/in-defence-of-technical-tests], I started thinking about what makes a good tech test.

I've previously covered why I use Ubuntu [__GHOST_URL__/why-i-use-ubuntu/], even at my day job where I have a Windows laptop I spend most of my time using…

I use Ubuntu Linux.

I've just undergone a round of recruitment to expand my team at work.

I took the #GitChallenge to compare GitHub and GitLab

I've written a few times about GitLab and the CI/CD pipeline features it has.

There are millions of blogs out there.

It's that time of year when we undertake a spring clean of our homes ready for the year ahead.

This seems like a very simple and trivial thing, but it's something which gets easily overlooked.

The great part of a CI/CD pipeline is the headache which can be removed from deployments.

Doctrine is a great abstraction layer, and I've resolved to use it more and more through my projects to keep things simple and maintainable.

I mentioned back in August that I'd changed my backups [__GHOST_URL__/changing-my-backups/]to use a NAS enclosure rather than a full blown server.

Having recently updated a Magento installation to apply SUPEE-11219, there were issues when searching for products using the filters for the grid.