Serverless PHP Applications on Digital Ocean Functions

"Digital Ocean Functions is a serverless compute product Digital Ocean recently launched. It supports PHP as one of the runtimes, along with Node.js, Python, and Go."

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Introducing the New WebPageTest Recorder Chrome Extension

"WebPageTest’s custom scripting functionality unlocks some very powerful testing capabilities, including being able to test multi-step user journeys and flows through your site and application. Writing those scripts, however, can sometimes be challenging."

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COUNT(*) vs COUNT(id) in MySQL

"TL;DR: Use COUNT(), not COUNT(id), when you want to count rows. You have probably read in a bunch of different places that you shouldn't use SELECT() in MySQL when you don't need all the data. SELECT(*) selects all the columns in the table, not just the ones that you might need."

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Key Takeaways from the DynamoDB Paper

"In 2007, a group of engineers from Amazon published The Dynamo Paper, which described an internal database used by Amazon to handle the enorous scale of its retail operation."

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How technology literally changes our brains

"Nicholas Carr on deep reading and digital thinking. In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan published his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he writes, “In the long run, a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act."

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The productivity tax you pay for context switching

"You probably won’t finish this article. In fact, I may have already lost you to another tab in your browser. Or an email from your boss. Or a ping from a coworker. Or any number of other digital distractions that have come to define modern life."

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RedwoodJS vs. BlitzJS: The Future of Fullstack JavaScript Meta-Frameworks

"Redwood and Blitz are two up-and-coming full-stack meta-frameworks that provide tooling for creating SPAs, server-side rendered pages, and statically generated content, providing a CLI to generate end-to-end scaffolds."

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Upgrading Bash on macOS

"One thing that many macOS users don’t know is that they are using a completely outdated version of the Bash shell. However, it is highly recommended to use a newer version of Bash on macOS, because it enables you to use useful new features. This article explains how to do this."

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How to run Minikube on an Apple M1 chip without Docker Desktop

"Docker Desktop failed me, and at the time (13th July 2022) of writing this article, Hyperkit, VirtualBox, and other hypervisors specified here don’t work on the Apple M1 chip. Weeks ago, while using Docker Desktop, it suddenly got stuck in a start-stop loop."

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A Functional authentication and authorization System using JWTs

"A secure authentication system is an important part of most full stack web development projects."

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Accessibility Check #1

"Today I'm starting my very first accessibility check. I'll be auditing websites to see how well they implement accessibility and pointing out the problems and items that need improvement."

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The Slotted Counter Pattern

"It is a common database pattern to increment an INT column when an event happens, such as a download or page view. You can go far with this pattern until bursts of these types of events happen in parallel and you experience contention on a single row."

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