mglaman.dev – July 7th, 2023
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Here's your weekly newsletter from me, Matt Glaman!
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My latest blog post
I recently started to leverage DDEV snapshots in my CI's end-to-end testing workflows. Here's now I leveraged GitHub Action cache to speed up my workflow.
Using DDEV snapshots to speed up GitHub Actions workflows
My projects all use DDEV for local development. Regarding end-to-end testing, as part of my continuous integration process, I also use DDEV! This way, my scripts for running Cypress are the same locally and in my CI. Leveraging DDEV in your CI is especially useful if your project has multiple domains, which is harder to replicate using good old php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 -t web. Recently I wanted to speed up my end-to-end tests by avoiding full site installs for each job. A full site install could take a few minutes with the default content creation.
Tips & tricks
In the Stop Nitpicking episode of the Radical Candor podcast, they discussed what nitpicking is and when it is appropriate. I highly recommend giving it a listen, especially since many of us work in a remote async communication world.
What stuck out was their focus on context, especially if you are building something intended to outlast you and your cohorts and grow beyond your expectations. This resonates with software development. We are building systems that will live longer than we work on them. They will be used in ways we don't expect. So it is important to nitpick and consider even the smallest details. But we don't have to be mean or inconsiderate about it.
This week's live stream
I worked on Retrofit and support for drupal_add_library along with drupal_add_js for settings support.
Twitch
Twitch is the world's leading video platform and community for gamers.
Interesting links
- Open standards, trust, and Google
- Cassidy Williams writes about the selling of Google Domains and other changes at larger companies and how technologies built on open standards reduce friction when services are shut down.
- "parallelizing" php and keeping it simple
- Nick Gavalas has an interesting blog post about how Facebook parallelized PHP using multiple requests when they first implemented BigPipe and pagelets (similar to Edge Side Includes.) I had done something similar at a previous job to re-upload files to a safety management system when a user uploaded a file to Drupal.
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