July 28, 2023

mglaman.dev – July 28th, 2023

Hey there!

Here's your weekly newsletter from me, Matt Glaman!

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My latest blog post

I previously wrote about using DDEV snapshots to speed up testing workflows. You can expand this to upload the snapshots to S3 for developers to reuse.

Speed up developer onboarding with DDEV snapshots from your CI

In my previous blog post, Using DDEV snapshots to speed up GitHub Actions workflows, I explained how DDEV snapshots can be used to speed up continuous integration workflows for end-to-end tests. A workflow runs on the main development branch to create a DDEV snapshot to be cached and reused by subsequent jobs. If that cache can speed up continuous integration workflows, why can't it also speed up developer onboarding?

Tips & tricks

What is one thing you can do on Monday that will make tasks easier or unnecessary? I spend my Fridays reviewing how my week went and what I'm expecting for my next week. This lets me find patterns and the best time to invest on Monday.

Why on Friday and not on Monday, the start of the week? It allows my thoughts to incubate over the weekend while I'm disconnected from work. It's also easier to retrospect how a week went on Friday, instead of trying to remember on Monday (unless you keep great notes!)

This week's live stream

I'm on vacation and didn't live stream this week 🙃.

Interesting links

• Remove Unnecessary PHP Composer Polyfills
  • Symfony provides various polyfill libraries that allow using new language-level functions on previous versions of PHP. This is great if you're using PHP 8.1 functions on PHP 8.0 or using mbstring functions without mbstring actually installed. But it adds bloat if you do actually have native support and do not require the polyfill. This article explains how to use replace in your composer.json to remove those polyfills.
• 100 Tips for a Better Life
  • This link was in last week's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter by Tim Ferris, and I enjoyed it — especially the small, obvious ones.

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